


The Magicians of Starecross Hall

by thatbroadcast



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Epistolary, Fairy Tale Elements, Found Family, M/M, Post-Canon, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:41:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatbroadcast/pseuds/thatbroadcast
Summary: Being a series of interludes in the life of John Segundus, newly practical magician, in the year following the disappearances of Messrs. Strange and Norrell. Including: a new school for young magicians, explorations of the King’s Roads, Lady Pole’s alarming needle-work, unanticipated trips to Faerie, and John Childermass.
Relationships: John Childermass/John Segundus
Comments: 27
Kudos: 158
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pasiphile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pasiphile/gifts).



The first letter came the first week of October, a scant year after the loss of those infamous Revivalist magicians Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell. It was an extraordinary thing, this letter. Oh, it appeared most proper at the outset. The wax seal was typical red, hastily impressed with the outline of a small English goldfinch. The fine paper was the colour of eggshells, and addressed in a strong hand that nonetheless wavered, as careless letterers sometimes tend to, all up and down and not in a straight line at all. All told, a tolerable example of everyday correspondence. What was most unusual was the recipient - a magician - and the contents of the letter - which pertained to magic. 

The letter was from Osmotherly, North Yorkshire and it was addressed to _Mr John Segundus, Magician of Starecross Hall_. It was personally delivered to Mr Segundus by his manservant, Charles, who, having recently been made to suffer some great unpleasantries as a result of Faerie magic[1], was very much troubled over a newly discovered and deeply-felt belief that magic and magicians both were complicated, dubious things, and so the letter was presented upon a small silver tray that Segundus and Mr Honeyfoot, his dear friend and colleague, had never seen before.

Indeed, Mr Segundus remarked upon the tray, wanting to gently impress upon Charles that this level of ceremony was entirely undesirable to him. Charles responded quite plainly that he did not like to touch the letter more than was necessary, nor did he desire to remain in the room while it was opened, and that any further magical correspondence Mr Segundus wished to receive would be presented much the same. He went on to say he was very sorry indeed for it, but it seemed the only sensible course.

Of course you are thinking that most masters would object to being spoken to in such an impudent manner by their servants, and you would be broadly correct. However, Charles had been some three years at the Hall some by this point, and he had not begun his time there quite so shy of magical doings. Moreover, Mr Segundus was a most sympathetic soul and in truth he had still not got in the habit of having a servant at all. They were at this point in their acquaintance each well-versed in what they considered one another’s little idiosyncrasies, chief among them lately being Charles’s suspicious nature in regards to Segundus’s profession, and Segundus’s penchant for getting dressed without any input at all from Charles.

“Oh, you must open it at once! Do not delay for my sake, sir,” Mr Honeyfoot eagerly pressed him, once Charles had quit the room. They had just finished their morning repast - a most congenial affair of milky tea and hot seeded caraway buns, made all the tastier by Mr Honeyfoot’s own amusing letters from his wife and his three lovely daughters, who were the county over visiting an aged and exceedingly disagreeable relation. “I wonder what it could be? Perhaps it is from another London journal, requesting more of your excellent histories? Or it is an urgent letter from some great lord, desiring your services!”

What services these might be Mr Honeyfoot did not elaborate upon, which was just as well, Segundus thought. His spellwork tended rather more towards the mundane than the fantastical; he scarcely felt he could have provided any Lordly aide.[2]

Segundus confided that he did not often have letters from anyone but his publishers and Mrs Lennox, his patroness, and opened it eagerly, using the edge of a hastily-cleaned butter knife.

He had felt, upon seeing the address, an immediate and potent blend of pride and discomfiture. Discomfort, for what if Mr Honeyfoot or Charles were now suffering the mistaken impression that he went about his daily business telling anyone who would listen that he, John Segundus, was a magician and incidentally he lived just that way, at Starecross Hall? But there was no small amount of pride, too, for it was the first missive he had ever received that had addressed him thus. And so as he unfolded it so did his excitement unfold alongside it, until each revealed twist of cursive and ink felt as sharp and sweet as the initial sip of some fine port, which glass has been swirled and sniffed and remarked upon so that the drink becomes that much finer for all the pageantry. 

And he was a magician, after all! Oh, there were more and more self-styled magicians cropping up every week. Ladies and gentlemen whose neighbors' chickens now exclusively produced _Dermochelys_ turtle eggs, or who had generated small roiling rain storms in their once-stately dining rooms, or who had found that all the hair on their heads had turned to lush English ivy overnight. But it must be said that few of these people had Mr Segundus’s mind for scholarship, and even fewer still his facility for practical magic. Accidental magic is quite one thing (and indeed lately it had been happening more than it had in centuries, to some alarming effect!) but to perform intentional magic! Now that is something entirely different. Control is hard-won and must be applauded, for a magician might spend years upon years in arduous study only to find she has not the slightest propensity towards returning her hair to its previous state, and must continue to wield pruning shears like silver barber’s scissors.

John Segundus had been 38 by the time he had managed any practical magic at all.[3] Being a most humble soul, he would be the first to tell you that his success had been due in no small part to Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell - for that same day they had restored magic to England, so that anyone with the talent for it might use it! - and also to John Childermass, Norrell’s servant, who had been so impatient about the whole business that Segundus had felt he had no other choice but to perform the spell. Since that auspicious day Segundus had enjoyed modest success with many of the spells he had tried, and had even set to devising some few of his own. 

But the letter! Oh, that letter. He read it over twice with growing dismay. The first time he was impatient, hasty with anticipation. The second time he was slow and studied, wanting to make very certain of its contents. Once he felt he had really grasped the thing, he set it down upon the table rather too near the open butter keeper and leaned as far back in his chair as the creaky old oak would allow him.

“Oh,” he said, and frowned. His brow was furrowed. He had caught his bottom lip between his teeth, where the skin went first pink and then white and then pink again. He was, in short, the very picture of consternation. He opened his mouth as if to speak further, but all he managed was a short, thoughtful, “Hmm.”

Mr Honeyfoot was so alarmed by Segundus’s reaction - he had rarely seen his friend so perturbed - that the genial smile he wore as habitually as his white necktie began to turn about the edges. “Are you all right, sir? Is it some terrible news? Or perhaps it is one of your headaches? I will fetch Charles back straight away with the feverfew!”

“Oh, no. No thank you, but I am quite well,” Segundus assured him, and was momentarily quite touched by his friend’s concerned before he lapsed into pensive silence once more. “Hmm,” he said again.

He took up the letter again, but only to hand it over to Mr Honeyfoot, who was by this point all over anxiety and had been wondering if he ought to fetch Charles, or perhaps the village doctor, after all. Mr Honeyfoot looked inquiringly at Segundus, who merely nodded as though to say, at your leisure, sir. So Mr Honeyfoot eagerly began the letter from Osmotherly, which read as follows:

_Sir —_

_I beg your humble pardon, for though we have never had the good fortune to meet, I am compelled to write to you without the necessary letter of introduction following a long interview with a mutual friend of yours and mine, Mr John Childermass. He has said much of your irreproachable character and, upon hearing of the predicament that has plagued my good family this past year, has emboldened me to seek your counsel._

_It is my daughter Lucy of whom I write. She is a good, dutiful girl of fourteen. However, Lucy has lately been displaying signs of what Mr Childermass assures me is a great magical capability. You would be most impressed to hear what she has done! We know some thing of what we may expect from Lucy in the coming years, as my wife has long been a devoted reader of_ The Friends of English Magic _! However, sir, to put it to you plainly, we feel Lucy would sorely benefit from a guiding hand. We know well that abilities such as hers must be cultivated in the proper directions, lest they grow wild and untamed._

_Mr Childermass has confided that you may soon reopen your school for young magicians and thus I must beseech you, sir: take our Lucy into your favourable consideration! She is a clever girl of polished manner who would only benefit from your tutelage. Mr Childermass has spoken highly of your abilities in regards to magic, and informed us of your former success in tutoring young persons upon all aspects of education._

_I implore you to respond with all haste, sir, so that my wife and I might make alternate arrangements if they are needed. We would be very glad indeed to host you for an interview, so that you might meet Lucy and observe her potential for yourself. We have some small questions to put to you ourselves - the presence of suitable chaperones chiefly among them, though we also wish to hear some of your planned curricula, and whether there might be daily prayer. We have heard as much of your affinity for magic as we have of your admirable disposition, and would count ourselves lucky indeed to make your acquaintance._

_Most respectfully,  
Henry Coffin _

“Ah,” said Mr Honeyfoot. “Hmm.”

They sipped their tea for some time in a silence broken only by the muted tap of porcelain against table through fine white tablecloth. The conversation, when it hesitantly resumed, revolved chiefly around Segundus telling Mr Honeyfoot quite urgently that it had not been his intention at all to begin his school again in secret without any input from Mr Honeyfoot, and Mr Honeyfoot saying of course he had never considered it might be so! He was forever in admiration of Mr Segundus’s strength of character and knew he could never do such a thing, and perhaps Childermass was somehow mistaken? Segundus responded that Childermass was not much inclined to ever being mistaken, or at least he had never been mistaken in his presence or the presence of anyone in his personal acquaintance. They both wondered what Childermass could possibly have meant by misdirecting this poor gentleman to plead his case with Segundus. It seemed an unnecessary cruelty.

“Well!” Mr Honeyfoot said, eventually, when they had finished their tea and Segundus was conscientiously re-folding the letter and setting it aside, so he might take it upstairs to his study - for what purpose he could not have said, only feeling in some deep part of himself that it would not be very correct to dispose of it. “I know you should not like to hear it, sir, but I think we shall have to wait to find that out.”

Henry Coffin’s was the first letter to arrive addressed to Mr John Segundus, Magician of Starecross Hall, but it was not the last. In fact, he received so many letters that autumn that it sometimes felt as though someone had taken out a paid advertisement promoting his services in every newspaper in England. But then, Segundus privately thought, someone rather had, and that someone was a raconteur named Childermass. 

The lie was so absurd! It was so mean-spirited! It was so entirely unreasonable! Segundus had not had even the smallest intimation to start up a school for magicians after the first attempt had been so thoroughly crushed beneath Norrell’s heel. And hadn’t Childermass been that heel? He had hoped that with the return of magic to England - the thing he had longed for his whole life - he might finally be allowed to settle into a quiet life of study and reflection. Indeed, he had lately been chiefly concerned with writing a definitive biography of Jonathan Strange[4]. Mrs Lennox had been so very pleased with this idea that she had kindly allowed him the continued use of her house, even after every thing that had happened! But of course no sooner had he begun to relax had that first letter from Osmotherly arrived, and his entire situation had once more been thrown into anxious disarray.

Why Childermass had lied so boldly and so readily to so many, he had not the faintest. He had not ever known Childermass to go about spreading untruths. In fact, Segundus had long admired his reckless pragmatism. Had felt a private relief at it, comfort in the idea that people such as he existed. That there was, in some happy few, an innate and vivid candor that class and Christian morality both had not managed to quash. Childermass was not always forthright, and he was not always clear as to his purposes, but he was no liar (except when the situation - or his former master - had dearly called for it). And so it was immediately clear to him that Childermass was madly working towards some indefinite goal, and that he intended for Segundus to be part of it, though to what end he could not say.

They had not exchanged correspondence in some months. Following the disappearance of his master, and at Segundus’s eager invitation, Childermass had stayed some weeks at Starecross. He had kept very much to himself, either studying the Raven King’s (objectionable, lawless) word or smoking endless pipes, pacing the barren moors that surrounded Starecross on all sides.

But no sooner had Segundus got used to having the man skulking about then had Childermass taken up with Vinculus, indicating he planned on touring him about England’s most venerable, ancient magical societies in order to hear their learned opinions - for whatever good that might do him! He had left his meagre possessions (a bible, a _Child’s History of the Raven King_ , a spare coat) in the attic room he had commandeered as his own, but had then quickly become so transient that Segundus could not have sent him a letter even if he dearly wished it.

And how did he wish it! He took to composing baldly resentful letters to Childermass in his mind. He silently practiced scathing diatribes that would most certainly dismay the man, and make him reconsider this whole business altogether. He wished him caught in the rain upon horseback upon unpaved roads. If not for Segundus’s own sake, then for that of those parents who wrote to him pleading for the guidance of their magical children, when he could not be of any use at all. 

Oh, he had written some few short letters and sent them (rather cunningly, he thought) to a handful of acquaintances within those societies of magicians. If any had truly hit their mark in terms of urgency he could not say, for he had felt upon composing them that good sense must dictate discretion, and so he had kept the letters as mild and inquisitive as possible. 

Had his friend met Mr John Childermass lately, or did he expect to meet him soon? If it were the latter, would his friend perhaps do him the utmost kindness of letting Mr Childermass know that John Segundus would very much appreciate his advice upon some small magical matter? If he had already met Mr Childermass, did he know where Mr Childermass might be headed to next?

Mr William Hadley-Bright wrote back first, saying that he had seen Mr Childermass at the monthly meeting of the Learned Society of Magicians in Norwich just the night before, only two days after receiving Mr Segundus’s letter, but had been unable to get near enough to so much as shake the man’s hand, due in large part to the absolute uproar the presence of his book had caused. Wrote Hadley-Bright: “One may ask if it is very proper for the Raven King’s book to go about quite so naked and so often in his altitudes, but I say it was the finest entertainment Tom and I have had in years!”

Mr John Maydenstone wrote to say that yes, Mr Childermass had been in London some weeks ago and that the resulting furor was so great, he hoped that (if it were not too disagreeable to say) Mr Childermass was not planning a return trip any time soon. Dr Martin Ashby, of Shropshire, said much the same, and added that he had seemed a most canny, brooding sort of character. More letters came, and all were so alike in tone and content that they might as well have been written by a single man. All of them together boiled down to: no, this friend or that had not managed to speak with either Mr Childermass or his disagreeable, drunken book, and if they had, Mr Childermass had been quite unable to lend his ear for more than a minute here or there because there was always this or that other magician eager to interrogate him upon any number of subjects, and it had all really been quite a commotion, you see. 

The more Segundus thought about it, the more it became exceedingly clear that Childermass did not wish to be questioned. Indeed, he seemed only to stay in any place long enough to achieve three things: presenting the Raven King’s book, identifying those magical young persons, and bending the ears of their guardians with tales of Starcross Hall and the kindly magician that resided within it. Which Segundus felt was really quite enough to be getting on with, for such short visits. Childermass seemed to be really getting a move on. He appeared in all these letters - all these fantastic, pitiable missives - much as a particular character may inhabit a variety of folk tales. Each with some unique morality lesson. Each with some fantastic tale of magical uproar.

And he had swindled missives from all over England! Some came from London. A great many came from York and Newcastle, and a small handful came from Kent. They came from nearby villages, from distant cities, from fishing hamlets along the coast. They were inked smartly upon fine linen paper by high society ladies with admirable hands and dashed onto common foolscap by merchants and farmers. They were concerned with small boys and young women and families all asunder. They were filled with animated toy theatres, and barn cats that were immensely surprized to find themselves suddenly capable of human speech, and enchanted kettles whose whistles had become Scotch airs. And dead in the center of all of these stories was Childermass. He was a yellow-curtain sage and a whispered suggestion and the pied piper, all. He was the sympathetic ear, the soothing balm. He was the full-page promotion in The Times. He was bundled together with unbleached post office string and delivered upon a silver tray. 

Segundus sometimes thought that he might knock Childermass’s top hat straight off his head when next they met. He had ceased to feel badly about these little resentments.

By the beginning of November, Segundus had received nearly 50 letters. After the first few deliveries, when the deluge shewed no signs of slowing, Charles had given the post man a guinea so that he could accept them all without the two of them being tasked to counting out endless pennies, a chore which they both held to be pure Sisyphean torment.

Segundus personally felt rather Herculean about things, and that he might require spectacles sooner than later.

He had read every single one of these letters, some more than once. Then he had arranged them upon his desk into three neat stacks of yes, maybe, and regrettably not, because while some had undoubtedly been written by parents with a negligible sense of what magical ability actually presented as, many more were defensible. These tugged mightily on Segundus’s heartstrings, to say nothing of kindly Mr Honeyfoot. They each of them held children very dearly indeed, and it pained both men to hear of such trials and tribulations as had befallen some of these families.

Which is not to say each letter held a tale of woe! Some contained lovely things, truly marvelous discoveries of magic. Why, that first week, they had one from a governess in Newcastle upon Tyne whose young charge - a girl of 12, Miss Agnes Horsfall - had spied a rainbow filtering in upon the dining room wall and caught it in a crystal tumbler, where it now danced and shone (so long as one remembered to keep a piece of heavy cardstock upon the opening so it could not escape). Segundus very much desired to know what uses a captive rainbow might have, and had soon begun carrying about a crystal vial in the pocket of his waistcoat in case the opportunity to entrap one ever presented itself.

“I know you should not like to hear it, sir,” Mr Honeyfoot said one afternoon, having come by Starecross merely to borrow a book of Segundus’s before finding himself quite captive to Segundus’s mood, which was very dark and very cutting in regards to Childermass, “But I must urge you to reconsider the facts. There is no more Mr Norrell to put you out of business, and you have confided in me more than once that Mrs Lennox would dearly love to put Starecross to some greater use! I know for a fact that you yourself have often wished to begin again. I see no further obstacles. Why should you not have your school?”

Segundus knew what Mr Honeyfoot said was very sensible and correct. He knew, and yet he could not accept it, which very much perturbed him.

“I want to know what he means by it,” he confessed, feeling very wretched. Mr Honeyfoot’s look turned quizzical, and so Segundus hastened to explain. “Childermass! You know as well as I do that he does not do any thing without reason, so why has he concerned himself so fully with my occupation? To what end is he working? I cannot make any sense of it!”

Mr Honeyfoot laughed at him, but it was a warm, indulgent thing. “Oh, my dear Mr Segundus! Have you not considered that Mr Childermass merely esteems you? He seemed ever so regretful about halting our business those years ago. As well he should have been! I mean to say, I have the notion that perhaps he means to make up for Mr Norrell’s behavior - and by association, his own - by setting you up handsomely this time around. It is what you most rightly deserve, sir. No, I mean it! Indeed, I very much mean it. It was a nasty business he carried out, and you so tolerant of him and his undertakings, even after all of it! Lesser men than yourself would not have been so kind-hearted. No, I believe Mr Childermass intends you to have your school now that it is in his power to help you do so.”

Segundus had not considered this. In fact, when he tried to now it was as though every particle of him shied away from the very idea of it. Still, he went to his bed that night contemplative and solemn, twisting Mr Honeyfoot’s words this way and that.

These were the facts as he saw them: he was not some great magical scholar, nor possessed of any particular wit. He was an unmarried man of very limited means and a humble series of occupations. While these things seemed hardly calculated to disturb someone as socially unbothered as Childermass, they had bothered most everyone else Segundus’s whole life.

He had some faith in his own good character, of course. He had worked much of his life at decency. Like many gentle souls, he was much given to the idea that he himself was not innately decent, and worked very hard to spare any one the inconvenience of this glaring, congenital flaw. It never hurt any one, he would have said (had any one ever thought to ask him!) to strive for greater heights of compassion. Segundus had the idea, sometimes, that Childermass could tell how hard he belaboured this. Childermass had certainly always seemed amused by it. More-so than any other aspect of Segundus’ person, in fact. 

Childermass himself, now! He did not believe Childermass to be the sort of selfless individual who practiced altruism for altruism’s sake (though he was certain Childermass was as good a man as any could be), just as he did not believe himself worthy of whatever esteem Childermass appeared intent on bestowing him. If indeed it was esteem and not some calculated means to an end! No, there was some hidden purpose to this madness. 

“You are behaving very foolishly,” he told himself, emboldened by the dark solitude of his bedchamber. “You are being an utter blockhead.”

For he realized suddenly, even as he was filled with the sort of inward-facing melancholy that he condemned in himself more than anything, that none of these things mattered. This was not about him, or Childermass, or even magical society at large. He had been so preoccupied with confusion and annoyance that he had quite forgotten himself. He had the location, some knowledge, and a formidable patroness with the means to achieve this long-held dream. And now he had all the pupils he could want for! He had a singular responsibility to the magical children of England. He had been so wrong-footed about this entire business! 

In the end, as he finally closed his eyes and lay back against his pillow exhausted with revelation, Segundus found in his heart that Mr Honeyfoot had been correct. And so it was that he resolved, the following morning, to sit down and write several letters of his own.

_That night he dreamed he was upon the King’s Roads._

_He knew at once where he was. It could never have been anywhere else. Sometimes that is the way of dreams._

_There was a man beside him, pale and gaunt, with tangled hair that streamed all about his shoulders like black rainfall. He wore a circlet of polished, gleaming metal and a cold dark look upon his cold dark face. In his two pale and gaunt hands he bore two great raven’s feathers. He extended one to Segundus, the feather catching in the sunlight that fell so weak and grey in this land, all the dark shades of it turning purple then blue then black again. Segundus reached out to take it. He could not have done anything but._

_The moment his fingers brushed it -_

Lady Pole came on a gloomy day in early December. Snow had fallen late the previous night - lazy and soft, blanketing the roof and the trees and the fence posts until the hall and its grounds were all over white and hushed. It is in the nature of snow to dampen and quiet everything so that each chance sound becomes shocking and bold, and so Segundus heard the approach of her carriage from his upstairs study: the steady crunch of grass and ice beneath hooves, the creaking of wheels upon the newly-replaced packhorse bridge.

With this forewarning, he made quickly sure his hair was brushed and his clothing not in too much disarray and, rushing madly, met her at the gate just as one of her footmen was helping her down from her carriage. 

They made the usual greetings. A bow from Segundus, accompanied by a murmured, “Welcome to Starecross, my lady,” that the lady in question took gracefully, as was her due. She inclined her handsome head in acknowledgement, and allowed him to help her over the threshold with his hand upon her elbow, followed close by her lady’s maid (a lovely young woman Segundus remembered now was called Rebecca Rowe), leaving her footmen and her maids to their duties.

“I hope I find you well, my lady,” said Segundus, leading her some way into the long front hallway, where there was warmth to be found. “And I hope also that your journey was not so difficult as last time!”

“Oh, I should think my driver knows the way well enough by now,” said Lady Pole.

There was a laboured silence. Segundus was not, generally, a man much given to mindless chatter. But now, confronted with the lady and her mild, inquisitive stare, as though she patiently waited for him to continue on with some cheerful, pointless niceties, and much longed for it to be done with already, he found he could not stop himself from blathering.

“Might I call for tea? Or, I beg your pardon, perhaps you are tired from your long journey and wish to rest?” said Segundus. He could not stop himself from adding, conscious all the while of Lady Pole’s light, fixedly polite smile, “I have given you rooms nearby the girl’s dormitories. Mrs Lennox has sent all manner of fine furnishings from Bath and London so that it may be comfortably appointed for you! She was very pleased to hear of your letter, and begs your pardon she could not be here to meet you herself. It is both our dearest wish that you may be comfortable here, my lady. I am sure you will not find it quite so comfortable as your usual accommodations, but I beg you to tell me of any thing you require, any thing at all, and I will be most happy to provide it for you!”

Lady Pole shook her head, already out of her pelisse and handing it carelessly to Rebecca, who draped the pale green velvet, trimmed in mink, reverentially over her arm so it fell in lustrous folds that shimmered in the dim light. “I require nothing but a bed and a room, and perhaps a candle or two to read by, Mr Segundus,” she told him. “I have had enough finery for two lifetimes. Perhaps we might sit in the parlour, and you may tell me what you will expect from me.”

Segundus readily agreed and begged a tea tray from Rebecca, who surely knew the wild passageways and oddities of the hall well enough. She went silently off to hang Lady Pole’s fine pelisse and to seek the impromptu services of the cook. The matter of refreshment settled, he led Lady Pole down the hallway and into the parlour, where they retired to chairs before the fireplace and made polite, inconsequential conversation upon Lady Pole’s journey from London, and this new drapery, or that same old lovely painting until the tea arrived, carried by Charles, who eyed the lady in such a way as to convey the oddest mixture of class deference and suspicion.

He poured the tea himself, shooing Charles to his other duties. Lady Pole was most gratified they had remembered her preference for lemon above milk and honey, settling herself back into her armchair with the cup and the saucer and a sigh. It was a melancholy sigh. It lay very old and grey upon her shoulders. She was not yet 30, he knew, and already her countenance had a tired gradient about it, a jumble of melancholy and fatigue. Some women are wearied by marriage, he thought. Others, by circumstance. Lady Pole had been prematurely aged by both.

“It is very strange to be back here,” said the lady, eventually. She had an air of the confessional about her.

Segundus was at once alarmed. “I hope it is not causing you any undue distress!”

Lady Pole looked at him with the most peculiar expression upon her lovely face. It had an amusement to it he could not guess at the origins of, but a sadness, too. “You may think I have taken leave of my senses for good, Mr Segundus, but I will tell you very plainly: I am often distressed. I do not believe I will ever be any less distressed. And so, it does not matter much to me which location I happen to find myself distressed in.”

This made very good sense to Segundus, who wished to inquire further into her ladyship’s state but did not feel it very proper. He thought that Lady Pole had probably taken quite enough prodding from himself. How many afternoons had they sat here in these very chairs while she told him all her endless, hopeless fairy tales? So instead he said, earnestly, “I cannot suppose it will be easy, my lady, but I had a hope we might each endeavour to create better memories here. For our own sakes, and for all the young ladies and gentlemen whose futures we may yet shape.”

“Yes,” murmured Lady Pole, looking struck by this. “Yes, I have much the same hope, Mr Segundus.”

They sipped their tea in mutual contemplation for some time, a homely silence filled only by the snap of the fire, the occasional clink of fine painted porcelain. Segundus supposed he was feeling very wistful. It was not that he longed for the past, no, nothing could be further from the truth! But it was such an unexpected thing to sit here in this room where they had once sat, caretaker and patient, and now they were a lady and a gentleman - which they had both been then to be entirely correct, but such things had not much mattered at Starecross, with the pall of strange fae magic cast dark and cloying over every inch of every room. What a remarkable thing, to share tea and conversation now with her ladyship. He found this situation much more pleasant, all-around.

“I suppose it was very rude of me to write you as I did,” Lady Pole said after some time, looking not at all troubled and in fact slightly pleased with herself. “I admit that when I received the letter from Mr Childermass my very first inclination was to set it on fire. But then I had a visit from Arabella, and she convinced me that I must read it and see what he had to say. He was very forward! I suppose I cannot be too surprized. He said that he could not blame me if I did not wish to ever set eyes on this place or you again, but that he thought I would be very useful to you as a chaperone, or perhaps even as some school mistress of comportment. He said I have a unique perspective of magic that may be useful to your purposes. I think he is right. You say you intend to take young ladies as pupils?”

Segundus nodded to say, yes, he did intend that. Lady Pole nodded herself once, and continued, “Well, I know you are chiefly concerned with turning out fine young magicians, Mr Segundus, but even magicians must learn such things as other ladies do. Or so society would have it! I wish it were not so. But I promise you, I will teach them all to the very best of my ability. I have had a very fine education myself, you know.”

And here Lady Pole paused for some time, looking quite unlike her usual self. That is to say, she looked hesitant, which was as foreign to her character as if she had suddenly begun belting an Italian operetta. For whatever damages the enchantment had done to her spirit, it had not seemed to matter how tired, how listless she became from dancing and endless processions and the weight of unspeakable roses - she had always been direct, even fierce.

Now, as she wavered for such long moments, Segundus found he was holding his breath. Eventually, conscious of breaking this silence that felt as confounding and portentous as any spell ever had, he said, gently, “My lady?”

“If you are to be my employer - truly, Mr Segundus! I intend to be treated as you would any other member of your staff. And while I am in your employ, I have only one requirement. That is, I will cease to be Lady Pole to you or any one else in this house. I would like to be Emma Wintertowne again. In fact, I dearly wish it.”

Her jaw was stubbornly set, shewing clear in the winter light that came gauzily through the window-glass. It was a pale, small light, and Lady Pole herself was pale and small upon her chair, holding her teacup against her saucer in a caged and careful manner, the way one might entrap a butterfly or small bird in their hand, as though the cup were some tremulous thing that she had caught and wished to keep.

“My Lady,” he said, feeling immediately disagreeable for it, “What of Sir Walter?”

“Oh, my husband will not mind it.” She gave a little laugh that held little amusement. “Well, I should say he does mind, but he is a politically-minded man and I think I am very bad for his business. No, Sir Walter has his occupation. He will barely notice I am gone. I think in the end he might be thankful for it. Our neighbors still think me quite mad, you see. They read the letters I sent to the Times and still they think me mad! As time goes by I find I have little desire to sit about his home like some decorative vase, waiting for his use. I would very much like to be of use here, Mr Segundus.”

Segundus could not find it within himself to refuse her. In truth, he had not even the slightest notion of doing so at all, though the request shocked him to the core as much as it concerned him - as much as he found he could understand it. She must have seen the agreement shewing in his face, for she let out a little sigh, softening at once in her countenance.

“You do me a kindness, sir,” she said, voice hushed. Then she set her teacup and saucer back upon the tray with a gentle hand and looked at him expectantly, her manner now one of business, so that he might ignore the way her eyes had suddenly gone so bright. “Now, I believe we have a great deal to discuss. How many girls will we be expecting? Might you shew me to their dormitories so I might get a better sense of things? I already know my way around, but I expect any number of things will have changed, and I would be very pleased to see the hall as it is now.”

“I fear I must insist on shewing you to your rooms before we get down to business! I would be a very bad host if I did not, I think.” He found himself smiling at her. To his great surprize, she smiled back for the first time in his memory, and it was as lovely as he had supposed it might be. 

His first interview was set the first day of the new year. Osmotherly was close enough for a day trip, and there he found Miss Lucy Coffin to be not only a most magically-inclined sort of young person, but one blessed with a very agreeable temperament. His list of prospective students had been winnowed down, after much debate between himself and Mr Honeyfoot and Miss Wintertowne, to twelve students aged 11 to 16, and he was now chiefly concerned about how they might all get along in such tight quarters. Decency demanded separate dormitories for the young ladies and gentlemen, of course, but they would often be taking classes and meals together.

“Take it from me, sir, my lady,” said Mr Honeyfoot, who knew better than either of them could ever hope to, “Young ladies and gentlemen will always find some way to quarrel. We must be vigilant! To say nothing of impropriety! Though I am sure such young people as these will comport themselves with all decency.”

“I suppose some of society may find it very scandalous,” said Segundus, feeling suddenly very anxious.

Miss Wintertowne snorted in a very unladylike manner. “Norrell and Strange both have proven time and again that magicians will always find themselves quite above all the trappings of decent society. The young ladies you will teach are already ruined in the eyes of some men. Let them not also be shamed for it here.”

Mr Honeyfoot thought upon this for some time and eventually found he heartily agreed with her. Segundus found himself wishing to congratulate Childermass - for of course he had sent Miss Wintertowne to them - as much as he wished to ask the man if he intended for Segundus to have any input at all in the formation of his own school.

And oh, the Honeyfoots! Segundus, upon receiving the effusive letter of approval from Mrs Lennox, had immediately visited his dear friends and asked if Mr Honeyfoot should like a position with Starecross. Of course he had agreed at once, and as merrily and enthusiastically as any young man of twenty. Mrs Honeyfoot had been thrilled beyond measure that her husband and their dear friend Mr Segundus should have such an auspicious new calling. She said she had always known their dream would come to pass. Indeed, upon hearing the news she had first danced about their parlour, and then she had promptly informed their husband that they must move as close to Starecross as it were possible to get, and immediately. Her husband had naturally agreed. They had chosen a fine country house a short distance from the hall, close enough that Mr Honeyfoot or herself might even take breakfast there from time to time without troubling themselves overmuch.

And so daylight hours were soon chiefly concerned with scholastic matters. Inventory (candles, pens, ink, paper, counterpanes and tea services and all manner of new, fine furnishings that Mrs Lennox wished his students to have!), and construction, and interviews, and to say nothing of curriculum! It would do some injustice to those weeks to merely call them busy, for most nights found himself and Miss Wintertowne (and occasionally Mr Honeyfoot, if he could not find the energy to return home) in the parlour, slumped exhausted and in some disarray, not a one of them caring overmuch for propriety or for each other’s society, so exhausted were they.

His nights he dedicated to his biography of Jonathan Strange. He had always been by nature a fastidious record-keeper, and so all their correspondence he found already neatly arranged in a drawer by date. He began instead with the very pleasant task of reading them all over again, and as he read he could not help but to feel a sense of great pride in their friendship, for they described such feats of magic and such amusing anecdotal asides that they were a perpetual delight. Was it any wonder he had so admired the man? Was it any wonder he took such care of Strange’s legacy? For in Strange he had found the answer to his question, the question he had asked all his life - the certain knowledge that it was a _right_ question, and that the magic he had read about in all those fantastic histories was truly within his grasp, if only he could reach far enough. 

It was among these letters that he became reacquainted with all of Strange’s lengthy descriptions of his journeys upon the King’s Roads. These he felt compelled to keep apart from all the others, in a little wooden box upon his desk, for what reason he could not say. He felt compelled also to read them again and again, and he found each reading as delightful as the last. Each curl of cursive and ink rising from the page became the towers and turrets and bridges Strange described. Every crossed _T_ or flourished _G_ was some river or road crafted by the Raven King. They seemed to him as love letters, as though penned by some friend or another who feels compelled to speak when their heart has met another, similar heart, and been struck - as a conductor may strike a tuning fork, and all the orchestra may hear that clear sweet tone and be at once compelled to match it.

He wore no greatcoat because he did not wish to be encumbered, and was anyway rather inclined to think that the Raven King would not make his personal roadways so very chill. Some time ago - the first and only time he had been permitted beyond the doors of Mr Norrell’s library, in fact - he had seen reference to a spell meant to warm one’s whole person without any external heating source at all, but in lieu of this lost knowledge he brought a small metal flask filled with whiskey and his least threadbare scarf.

So it was, thusly prepared, that he stood before the largest mirror in Starecross Hall. Segundus shivered and wavered before it with his hands twisting nervously together, studiously avoiding recollection of his own pale complexion and much greying hair, the white cravat tied nervously round his neck. 

It was a beautiful mirror. Magnificently tall and wide, framed in polished bronze, and situated just so against the wall farthest from the drawing room doors so that it reflected back the room, giving it cavernous depth. The room itself was very dark and very cold just now. The fire had been allowed to burn out by early evening, once the servants had ascertained there would be no great need for it. Unfortunately, Segundus felt now there was in fact a very great need, for he had brought with himself only a single candle and the light it cast was negligible. He set it down on a nearby table, a fine, ornate thing of lacquered oak, where it flickered and cast strange shadows upon the walls.

All the clocks in the hall had just tolled a rolling midnight, which seemed auspicious and in any case meant that all its residents would be abed. Miss Wintertowne, he had discovered, was rather inclined to tortured wakefulness, but she had retired early this night with a recent (and quite controversial) biography of Donata Torel, a figure whom she very much admired.

He thought of Strange. Indeed it was hard not to think of Strange, when here he stood now poised upon the very same adventure that had so invigorated and thrilled his friend. Segundus did not find himself very thrilled. In fact he felt timid, and as though this might all be a very foolish mistake. He was not at all certain he could even achieve the magic. And if he did, he wondered, for what purpose? But the thought had quite overtaken him these past weeks. He had re-read all his letters so many times over that they should have become very tedious, pedestrian as any particularly dull scholarly text (though he did not find very many scholarly texts particularly dull), but nothing could have been further from the truth. Instead they had become as a best-beloved novel, or a picture in a gallery that one could always derive pleasure from viewing.

How joyfully Strange described that first, sudden adventure along the Roads! “Imagine it!” Strange had written, paper spotted all over with enthusiastic ink-splatter, “Just imagine, if you may, passing through a reflection as though it were merely some common doorway! And all one really needs is a spell of revelation and a spell of dissolution, though a man with strong enough will might find he does not need either. I myself have not since the first attempt!” He had here most helpfully included his own spell of dissolution, which he claimed worked better than any else he had found. 

Segundus set his hand to the cool glass for a moment, fingers spread wide and searching. His hand, when he withdrew it, left an unsightly smudge which he buffed at with the overlong, frayed cuff of his shirt. He frowned at himself. He squared his shoulders. His reflection did the same. “Well,” he told himself sternly, “ _Are_ you a magician or aren’t you?”

In the end, the spells themselves were easy enough to perform. It was just as Strange had said it would be. He murmured Doncaster’s words of revelation, and he performed Strange’s spell of dissolution, voice hushed in the expansive quiet of the room.

And then he peered into the mirror, and then he peered quite beyond it. Through the pane of glass, past the thin layer of amalgamated tin and mercury below and further and further and then! - further still, into some place that was at once remarkably strange and also entirely familiar, in the way that dreams can sometimes seem familiar. That is to say, it was at once so like and unlike anything he had seen before that he had the sudden, strange idea that every object in his periphery had moved itself six inches to the left, and taken on curious proportions, and it was so all over unnerving that the spell of dissolution, meant to make the mirror traversable, caught in his throat. He could see now that his friend had been quite correct: the spells themselves were almost entirely unnecessary, for once one saw the way, one could scarcely forget it. 

He could see distant black spires and archways. He could see a mess of irregular stairways and thin strung foot-bridges between turrets beset with spikes of dark stone that grasped upwards like dead fingers from a grave. He could see a grey sky dotted in immense clouds, heavy with rain. He had the oddest idea that he had seen all of these things before - perhaps Strange’s letters, and his descriptions of Monsieur Minervois’s engravings had done them more justice than he had anticipated - and yet there was still something very raw about it. His heart was beating very fast. The single candle on its small ornate table began to take on the peculiar shining aura that light sometimes did when one of his headaches was looming.

He had a brief thought that he ought to have told Mr Honeyfoot, at the very least, what he had intended to do. He had another thought that it was rather too late for that, for he was afraid if he paused for any one or any thing he might never continue. And so he took a deep breath, held his hands in fists at his sides, and stepped through the mirror.

The heels of his shoes made a peculiar echoing click against the stone, as though he were traveling through a great hall and not, as it appeared, across a very tall and very wide bridge. The structure passed along a series of steep staircases and was itself dwarfed by the most enormous drawbridge that he had ever seen, hundreds of feet above and quite in disrepair. The mirror had not quite shewn it truly, he thought, amazed. The scale of it! The uncanny emptiness! The singular, chill bleakness that enveloped it all!

He took two tentative steps forward before the concept of having traveled through his own drawing-room mirror in order to have got here, to this curious place of such fantastic stone angles, made him stop very suddenly. He threw his hands up and out. He rather wished he had thought to wear his boots.

“I really should have brought a rope,” he lamented, though where he might have attached the rope to he could not imagine.

It was then that he remembered the whiskey, and though he found it a most repellant drink (it had been all he could scrounge from the kitchen at such short notice) he uncapped the flask and took such a large swallow that his eyes watered and his throat constricted. It calmed him somewhat, though, and in time he was steady enough to take some steps forward.

Where he was particularly he could not say. He had always enjoyed an exceptional sense of direction. Where another person might give you directions using mainly local landmarks or street names, Segundus was the happy, baffling sort of gentleman who would instead tell you to head East-South-East for approximately a league. Here his internal compass failed entirely. But then, he consoled himself, this was not England. And he was only the second man in centuries to stand here, in this extraordinary realm! Strange had made some desultory attempts at mapping the Roads he had traveled, but they could have been infinite for all anyone knew. Certainly none of the Aureate magicians had ever bothered to try. It seemed a grim, futile business in any case. The ground was not visible, if indeed there was a clearly-defined ground at all, and though a dim light touched every thing there were no earthly shadows beyond what the pathways themselves cast, no distant darkening or lightening of sky.

The bridge he found himself on was itself easily twenty feet across and made of unbroken grey rock, jutting out at odd angles as if it had grown in place organically, as one mass, and perhaps then been carved and somehow transported here from some distant mountain. Segundus stood equidistant along its length, and some hundred feet forward he could see its abrupt end. When he got himself to the edge he found a small, precariously winding staircase, leading downwards to a thin grey stone bridge.

Segundus found the staircase in good repair and got himself down it with only a modicum of prayer, though at the very bottom he found to his great disappointment that the bridge had collected a not-inconsiderable amount of water that soaked him straight up to his breeches.

Further along the water-logged bridge was a set of dirty white marble steps, leading upwards to a gigantic archway, extensively crumbling and beset by two massive carved figures on either side. It was a man in profile, left and right. A man with a young, handsome face and long wild hair like black rainwater. On his head he wore a hat with a raven’s wing affixed to each side.

The steps led upward to doors, arched and carved with great black birds, already pushed open and in unexpectedly good repair. He passed through them into a palatial hall, in a state of great ruin about the walls and ceilings. It was lit by shafts of light that passed through the fallen masonry and dark with shadows cast by no thing that he could see.

In the center of that hall was the most astonishing thing he had yet seen.

It was a statue. It was a life-size effigy, carved from smooth grey stone that shimmered and threw scattered points of light all across the filthy floor. It was a man upon a throne upon a plinth. A great bird perched upon the backrest of the throne, so skillfully made that each of its stone feathers seemed to catch some light stone breeze. The bird and the man both peered at the doorway, so fiercely and so intently that Segundus nearly glanced behind himself to see what had so taken the two. 

He longed for a closer look, but he found he was suddenly very afraid. The statue, huge and cold and shining, was so expertly carved that the Raven King’s gaze seemed very real and very discerning, catching upon Segundus so steadily - so expectantly - that his hands began to tremble. He could not bring himself to approach it. He could not bring himself to turn his back to it. He could not breathe.

The room was bare of any other ornament or obvious function and was so very large and all over gloomy that Segundus crept alongside the nearest wall, sodden shoes squelching uncomfortably, one of his shaking hands brushing the crumbling surface. He felt he could not take his eyes off the grey stone King, and why he felt so he could not say, only that it made him tremble to behold it, only that he suddenly desired very much to leave.

He had never inquired with Strange how one might travel _back_ from the King’s Roads, and in his prior excitement he had forgotten to review what histories of the Roads remained in the Starecross library. That he should be so foolish weighed very heavily upon him, for he realized suddenly - and with much embarrassment at his own lack of foresight - that there were no mirrors in this place to exit through. But in that same moment, now that he stood there against the crumbling wall with beams of light before and gloom behind, the answer was at once indescribably clear to him, as though he had known it all his life.

Segundus cast one last earnest look at the sad old hall, at the plinth that held the Raven King’s terrible likeness, shivering although it really was quite warm after all. Then he turned on his heel and walked through a shadow, home.

He could hardly contain his excitement over a late breakfast the following morning. His fingers beat against the table in mad patters like hail coming down and his feet - still pruney in new stockings and shoes, from his adventure upon the Roads! - tapped the rug, without any direction whatsoever from Segundus himself. Already inclined towards a somewhat nervous disposition, he upset his tea twice and sat his elbow on the grilled kippers, at which point Mr Honeyfoot put his fork down and leant forward, concerned. “My dear sir, is something the matter?”

“Perhaps it is an apoplexy,” Miss Wintertowne suggested, sounding rather more excited by the prospect than Segundus felt she properly should. She was hiding a wicked smile in the corner of her mouth, he could see it plain as day. “Our housekeeper had one over breakfast some years ago, poor soul. She inquired of my mother and I if perhaps we thought the toast had burnt, though it was in fact as perfectly made as it usually was, and then she had a terrible fit and fell over quite dead.”

“Good God!” Mrs Honeyfoot cried, and crossed herself. Segundus saw, from the corner of his eye (and to his quiet amusement), Charles and Rebecca Rowe do the same. “Well! Let us all pray that is not the case for our dear Mr Segundus.”

Segundus smiled politely at Miss Wintertowne, but could not find it in himself to rally, nor to chastise her. While it was true that he had once been her keeper, her doctor and her confidant, the reversal of the fairy’s spell had brought him quite beneath her once more. She was his employee, yes, but she was still a lady, however much she wished she were not. Mrs Honeyfoot tsked, but her expression - which she shared with her husband - was more fondly amused than not.

Why he did not tell any of them about his adventure he could not rightly say. If pressed, he might have said he believed Mr Honeyfoot might wish to accompany him, and Mr Honeyfoot was quite old and could not be expected to achieve much in terms of physical exertion. He might have said he did not believe it proper to discuss such things over breakfast. He might even have said he did not believe it proper to discuss such things in front of ladies.

All of these things he might have said would not have been entirely honest, of course. Mr Honeyfoot had never expressed the slightest desire to go upon the Roads himself. And Segundus had taught - and would soon teach - ladies all sorts of magical things, for he did not believe their sex ought to exclude them from the noble pursuit of magic. No, he knew in some deep well of himself that the truth was he simply wished to have some thing for himself. Some thing that no one else knew. It was only when one made desires plain, when one spoke out loud, that some thing contrived to ruin them. And this secret, this wonderful thing he had done and would do again, was already very dear to him. He did not wish for it to be taken from him as so many other things had been, all these years past.

But these were thoughts best kept to oneself, and so Segundus smiled and thanked his friends for their concern and said nothing else at all.

1He had not been particularly bothered himself by the excess of magic that had invaded Starecross the previous year. However, he had seen the sorry state in which it had left his master, and then had found himself obliged to watch as Stephen Black had somehow contrived to throw first a packhorse bridge and then an entire hill at a fairy. It would have been a stout-hearted man indeed who found himself confronted with such magic and come out the other side with any great enthusiasm for the subject. [return to text]

2It must be noted that while Mr Segundus was certainly a gentleman, he was one of extremely modest means. He had not often rubbed elbows with any Lords, though he had been employed by several as a tutor. In truth, he had a vague idea that any services a Lord might require would tend more towards hunting game or elevating the contents of his wine cellar than any grand acts of magic (the sort of magic that Jonathan Strange had once performed as easily as another man might exchange his hat!). He was not entirely sure either of those things were at all within his own oeuvre, and besides, the thought itself was so entirely discourteous that it made him blush, shocked at these little uncharitable notions which were not at all native to his character. As a result, he would have preferred to avoid the subject of Lords and their troubles all together.[return to text]

3Martin Pale’s Restoration and Rectification, the circumstances surrounding the need for which spell must be left to better scholars than I, for it is a grim business and the persons involved much changed by the experience. [return to text]

4By autumn of 1819 several publishers had already gone to press with biographies of Jonathan Strange. Most had been penned by gentlemen Segundus knew must have only met Strange in passing, and all were mistaken upon almost every pertinent detail of the man’s life and personality. The latest had been authored by a bold fellow named Hatch, whom Segundus assumed had not ever met Strange at all! For the opening pages had been chiefly concerned with impressing upon the reader how kind, how gentle, how humble was Strange.

Segundus had quite enough correspondence with the man in question - to say nothing of their years of acquaintance! - to prove this patently false. While his relationship with Strange had been extremely congenial, it had also often involved no small amount of benign quarrels of the sort that were so fundamental to Strange’s character (and to those of gentlemen scholars everywhere), such as Strange asking Segundus what he meant he couldn’t perform the spell, for he had personally found it very easy, and Segundus replying that this particular spell had not been done for three hundred years and that not every magician had Strange’s incredible facility for magic. This was very often followed by long periods of no communication at all when Strange concluded these conversations by admitting that yes, he supposed he was quite extraordinary.

While he would undoubtedly omit these little squabbles from his own book, it had seemed a terrible disservice to his friend to let the public at large go on believing in a Strange who was not at all the man that Segundus had known him to be. He had admired Strange greatly. Segundus thought him a very kind, noble sort of gentleman. But Strange was certainly not the sort of man apt to go around London performing domestic miracles upon wrinkled bed-linens or being kind to orphans, and that was just plain fact. All great men will become myths if we let them, Segundus had thought, but Jonathan Strange would sooner eat his own cravat than be relegated to history as some saintly reincarnation of the Raven King.

It is perhaps worth noting that no brave soul had yet attempted a biography of Gilbert Norrell. It is unclear whether this was due to the man’s well-known social reclusivity, or his infamously dreary attitudes upon so many aspects of magical scholarship, or merely because everyone remembered what he had done to Jonathan Strange’s _The History and Practice of English Magic_. In any case, it would be a great many years until anyone decided the reward was worth the risk.[return to text]


	2. Chapter 2

There was a shadow upon the wall. This was not unusual in and of itself, of course. The Roads were all over shadows, sometimes. Long dark shadows falling upon grand causeways, cast by looming, magnificent bridges. Alleys, and halls, and little stone fences covered all over by confounding shafts of darkness that fell without rhyme, as though some invisible building towered nearby.

This shadow was not like these other shadows. It was too dark. It gave an impression of scrutiny. Segundus stood with some uncertainty before the crumbling wall - the purposes of which were unclear - and cleared his throat.

“I do not think this is a proper place for a shadow such as this to be,” said Segundus. And then, quietly, to the shadow itself, “Hello?”

There was a long moment of silence, wherein Segundus considered how very foolish he had been, and then the shadow began to shrink.

It shrank and it twisted and then it coalesced into the shape of a tall, dark man, at which point Segundus reeled back in some fright, putting his hands up between himself and the shadow man. It was exactly as in his dream! The lean figure with his long hair that fell all across his shoulders like a spate of rain and his cloak as black as crow feathers. But then all at once the dim light caught the face properly, and it was not the man from his dreams at all, but Childermass. This was equally as astonishing, in all truth. 

“Childermass!” exclaimed Segundus.

“Mr Segundus,” said Childermass, and bowed.

“Whatever are you doing here? I had not expected to see any one. That is to say, I have never seen any one, and now that I finally have I am amazed it should be you!” His own short bow of greeting was sketchy, his manner inelegant in his excitement. If asked he would have admitted he did not think Childermass would be inclined to much mind the impropriety. After all, it seemed very improper to lurk about turning oneself into shadows.

“I could ask the same of you,” Childermass replied, and his voice was steady and his manner most cordial, but Segundus could see a calculated canniness about his eyes. He rather suspected Childermass was just as surprized as he was, and merely better practiced at concealing it. “I would have thought you would be nose-deep in a book at this hour.”

This had the air of an insult about it, but Segundus could hardly fault the man. He was so excited to have met another magician here upon the roads that he would have forgiven any number of personal remarks. Indeed, he felt his excitement could hardly have been dampened by any thing by this point, even if that other magician had turned out to be the disagreeable Dr Foxcastle! That it was Childermass was a very pleasant, though somewhat perplexing, surprize.

“Are you yourself exploring, sir?” Segundus said eventually, when the silence had stretched and taken on a life of its own. “I myself have been exploring for some weeks now, and I can say with certainty that you are the first person I have ever met. How extraordinary it is for us to have come upon one another like this!”

“The Roads are vast,” Childermass agreed. “I have never come out in the same spot twice, to tell the truth, though I have put myself to a great deal of trouble attempting it. It is significant odds indeed for us to meet as we have.”

“I am grateful for it,” Segundus confided in him. “And I have experienced much the same! It is confounding. I know there must be a way to achieve it, but if there is, I have not figured it yet. I don’t suppose you have any wisdom at all to offer me?”

“You are a very strange creature,” Childermass told him. He was giving Segundus such a look that Segundus himself looked down, searching his attire for some great stain he had not noticed, or perhaps he had not tucked in his shirt quite properly?

“I beg your pardon?” said Segundus, much confused.

“I expected you would be angrier,” said Childermass, blunt as ever. “I had a mind that you might not wish to speak to me at all, after the trouble I have undoubtedly caused you.”

“Oh, I was for a time,” said Segundus, thinking briefly of his shameful fantasy of knocking Childermass’s hat off his head. “I was furious! I do not believe I have ever been that cross with anyone in all my life, to tell you the truth.”

“I see,” said Childermass.

Segundus rushed to assure him, feeling quite wrong-footed. “But that is all behind us now. I enjoy my occupation immensely, sir, and though I dearly wish you had gone about arranging things differently - you caused me no small amount of consternation at first - I believe I must thank you with all my heart for it. I had not the fortitude to arrive at the same conclusion as you did, after all.”

He caught his breath for a moment and then felt very suddenly brave, as he was wont to do upon the Roads. Childermass was still waiting silently, keenly, allowing him the time to go on. 

“The only thing I truly wish to know is why you were so set on me. Surely there are other magicians better-suited to your purposes?” He added how he had considered that having Starecross Hall at his disposal had been a great impetus, and of course he had Mrs. Lennox’s personal favour, as well as her extraordinary good-will. Both of these things made a good deal of sense to him. But surely in the whole of England there should have been another magician with even grander resources? More knowledge? A better library?

Childermass regarded him for long seconds, his black eyes as queer and sharp as ever, before he tipped his battered hat upon his head with a quick, wry motion. “I am glad you enjoy your occupation, sir. I am also, as ever, glad to be of service.”

He paused for a moment, as though thinking some thing over very intently, and then continued: “If you truly want to know, it was a notion I have had since soon after my master and Jonathan Strange disappeared. After I left Starecross it seemed that not a day went by that I did not encounter some new magician in some sort of trouble or another. I am sure you have heard no end of stories yourself. Ladies and gentlemen and children, particularly in the North, are getting themselves into all sorts of mischief. It occurred to me that someone must be elected to properly teach them. And there is the matter of the book.”

“Vinculus!” Segundus said, “Whatever does he have to do with my school?”

Childermass shrugged. “Mr Norrell and I had a conversation many years ago, when we first learned of the existence of the Raven King’s book. We came to think - and I still believe - that any knowledge the book contained would oblige us all to reinterpret the tenets of English magic entirely. Now, I am in possession of that book. I am making every attempt to read it. It is the King’s word, as put down by his own hand. In the event that I manage it, I think we have a great responsibility to spread his word to every person who wishes to learn it. I do not believe that books of magic should be kept secret. That is why I have been shewing Vinculus to so many societies. I hope that we may all come to some conclusion together.”

This made very good sense to Segundus. But the school, he reminded Childermass, who gave a cold look as if to say he did not need any reminding. The school!

“The more I thought about the matter, the more I came to believe that the government or the King himself might come to the same conclusion as me and begin a school of their own, which could have caused us all a great deal of trouble. They do not have the same respect for magic as you or I, Mr Segundus. I do not think any of them truly understand magic at all. Not as we do. They would use magic for all their trivial business. They would wish to use us to make war upon England’s enemies. But I do not care to be told how to conduct myself now that my master has gone. I have a different vision for the future of English magic, and I intend to see it done. Naturally, I thought of you.”

“Me?” Segundus said, shocked.

“I believe that any institution of learning you begin would naturally further the interests of English magic. It is in your nature, sir. There are none better-suited than you. Not for this purpose. And did I not promise you those years ago that I would send you all the little lordlings as was in my power?”

“Well, yes,” Segundus said, because Childermass had. And he had stuck to that promise, in a way, when he had sent Lady Pole to his care. He had assumed that would rightly be the end of it. “But I did not think you would trouble yourself any further with my circumstances!”

“No, I did not think you would,” Childermass told him.

His mouth twisted up along one side of his thin pale face, budding upwards like fine English ivy. Segundus found himself quite struck. He supposed it was a smile, though he had not ever seen Childermass attempt one. He wished to know what else might be calculated to make Childermass smile. What, he wondered, could induce a man like Childermass to laugh?

“Well,” he said eventually, when he had got his bearings and Childermass had begun to look darkly amused, as he often did before saying something that would inevitably only please himself, “I see I have much to think about. For what ever it is worth, I am very much in agreement with you. I believe magic is the noblest profession in the world, and that we must protect its integrity in any way that we can. Only I think there could have been a less dramatic way of asking for my help. Perhaps you might write a letter next time.”

“You can depend on me, sir,” Childermass promised him, all solemnity. 

They regarded one another. Segundus could not help but think that Childermass quite blended here amongst the shadows and the rubble, though why he felt so he could not plainly say. He had never seemed so very occult. But there was something new now uncannily lit in Childermass’s aspect: some thing flickered and gleamed in those dark eyes, some thing which had been entirely lacking in Yorkshire and London, some thing that Segundus suspected had only stirred upon the Roads, wakening now in the wintry light that the Raven King had crafted. He found he dearly wished to know what Childermass saw in his own face, here amongst this curious grey stone. If he saw anything at all. He could not bring himself to ask the question.

Instead, they walked together among the falling masonry and the shadows.

As they walked, he told Childermass of the great hall he had encountered on his first trip, how he had chanced upon that black stone likeness of the Raven King, which sat so fierce and so lonely upon its plinth. Childermass agreed that this sounded very interesting indeed, and put a great many questions to him that he could not rightly answer, such as what era did the statue appear to have been carved? Were there any inscriptions upon the plinth? How old did the Raven King look? How near or far was it from the door?

Segundus described the statue in the finest detail he could, from the boots to the perching raven to the cold look frozen upon both their grey stone faces. He told Childermass, too, of the remarkable emotion he had experienced looking at them in their lonely old hall, quite alone but for the motes of dust that caught and danced inside the meagre sunlight. 

Childermass quickly grew frustrated with Segundus’s inability to answer his more esoteric questions and soon gave up all together, saying instead that he would turn all his efforts towards finding a way to locate the hall in question. He said he could think of three spells off the top of his head that would achieve it. Then he appeared to begin to think very hard about these spells, and lapsed into a pensive silence broken only by the occasional skitter of pebbles when one of their boots brushed some rubbled masonry.

Segundus used this reprieve to ask Childermass of any curious things he himself might have encountered, and so Childermass related a very strange tale of his own.[1] Strange, and so very alarming that Segundus gasped and said, “I suppose I did not think the Roads would be so very dangerous. I find that very foolish now.”

Childermass shrugged. “Dangerous they may be. But my curiosity is not satisfied just yet. I am not sure it ever will be.”

Segundus knew almost exactly what Childermass meant, for he felt much the same. The Roads drew him to them as a moth to a flame, but they were lonely with endless stonecraft, ancient discarded shoes and mysterious bodies of brackish water. He had wondered sometimes, in moments quite against his own gentle nature, how many other foolish magicians had lost their lives to the Roads, never to be found. If he were to lose his footing! It did not bear thinking about.

This thought proved so exceedingly worrisome that Segundus found himself turning to Childermass and saying, without any thought as to whether or not Childermass might consider it overstepping, “We would do very well to continue our explorations together! I only think it would be safer for the both of us. What if one of us should happen to slip and fall? It does not bear thinking about.”

Childermass gave him a very queer look. “I cannot see how I can be of any use to you as a companion.”

“You could be of great use!” Segundus insisted, aghast. “You know so many things I do not, after all, and I should really feel much safer to have you with me.”

Childermass appeared to think intently for some long moments. So long, in fact, that Segundus began to regret this very foolish insistence. Childermass likely had much business to attend to, after all, and should hardly enjoy being forced to explore a strange country with a man he held in no great personal esteem, whatever his good opinions upon Segundus’s skills as a schoolmaster.

But to his very great surprize, Childermass eventually nodded and said, “If that is truly what you wish, I will be available this following Sunday at this same time. If we can manage to find one another, I would be glad to accompany you for a time.”

“That would be very amenable to me indeed,” Segundus told him, most truthfully, most delighted, and thus agreed they parted ways through separate darknesses. 

After supper that night he took hot chocolate in the sitting room, before the fireplace in his particular favourite armchair. The Honeyfoots had already retired to their own home, bickering gently about this or that thing Miss Jane had mentioned in her latest correspondence, but Miss Wintertowne sat on the sopha. All ten of her whole fingers were occupied with a skein of pale green thread, which she was sewing carefully into a small tapestry of twisting vines. Devil’s ivy, she had sharply informed him. Quite unlike roses. They were delicate things, skillfully made clusters of spade-shaped leaves twined around a golden trellis.[2]

They talked for some time upon a recently acquired biography of Dr Martin Pale, which they had both greatly enjoyed, but soon a natural silence fell as Miss Wintertowne busied herself with her work and Segundus gazed upon the merry fire, feeling weary and cold down to his bones. The Roads drew him like nothing else ever had - not books or history or magic itself, in plain truth, which idea rather disturbed him for reasons he could not quite understand - but they left a certain grime on his person. It was not any grime as you might expect, no! He rather thought sometimes that it might be a spiritual taint, of the kind priests often spoke of. He felt changed. He could not say why he felt so.

He made three aborted attempts to begin his story, until finally Miss Wintertowne took pity, untangling her left hand and leaning forward to place it lightly upon his forearm. He twitched once and then subsided. “Mr Segundus,” she said to him, gently as he thought she must know how, “You seem most distressed, and I very much desire to know why. Please, you may confide in me if you wish.”

Segundus made a face that he suspected was terribly unpleasant. “I met Childermass today, upon the King’s Roads,” he confessed, though why it had so unbalanced him he did not know. 

“Childermass!” Miss Wintertowne sat back and regarded him intently, embroidery quite forgotten. The thread spilled from her slack hands like vines crawling all about her pale blue dress. “Whatever was he doing there? And what were you doing there yourself?”

He had realized, even in his consternation, that he would now be obliged to tell Miss Wintertowne of his recent adventures. Part of him dearly wanted to. He was, after all, proud of his achievement! How often had he wished to write a letter to Strange, informing him of his success? How often had he delighted in the idea of relating the whole story to Mr Honeyfoot, who would surely be overjoyed - for Mr Honeyfoot was so often overjoyed on behalf of his friends, and would surely be very glad to hear all there was to tell about the Roads themselves. He resolved now to discuss the matter with Mr Honeyfoot as soon as it were possible. 

His explanations took some time, in the end. Miss Wintertowne was herself an avid amateur historio-magician, and wished to know all manner of things about the Roads and the spells he used to visit them. His chocolate had grown quite cold by the time he had satisfied any small part of her curiosity. Still, she wished to know how he had happened upon Childermass, and what Childermass might have been doing there himself.

“I believe he was exploring, much the same as I was, my lady,” Segundus told her, sipping his chocolate. Childermass had never outright stated his purposes for being quite _there_ , in truth, and he was so slippery in his conversation that he had redirected Segundus’s inquiries with all the ease of a man swatting away a fly. But there was not much to be gained from the Roads beyond exploration for exploration’s sake. So exploration it must be! After all, Childermass was a very accomplished magician in his own right. It would only be natural that he should wish to see the Raven King’s own creation for himself.

In any case, Segundus felt quite unburdened to have related the encounter, and now freely told her all that he and Childermass had discussed: of their respective discoveries upon the roads, of the book Vinculus, of their magical studies, of Segundus’ own plans for his beloved school. He even told her of the very bold comments Childermass had made upon his concerns for the future of English magic, and the role Segundus’s school might play in it - for although Childermass had not outright said as much, that was surely what he had meant. The thought had needled at him long after they had parted ways. It seemed a great responsibility that Childermass had thrust upon him. Without even the decency to ask if Segundus wanted it or not!

“And so you see, we have agreed to meet again this following Sunday, though neither of us is sure we will succeed in happening upon one another again. I have certainly never managed to come out precisely where I intended. But I suppose that if we do not meet I will just write him a letter instead. He is currently in Lancashire, or so he says.”

Miss Wintertowne laughed at him. She was not unkind about it, for Miss Wintertowne was rarely unkind lately, but still Segundus’ cheeks burned. He drained his cup to cover the flush.

“You must not be too surprized,” she said, taking up the needle again. “There may well be many practical magicians all across the world now, but I think there are very few indeed with your particular skill. Childermass is your singular peer now that Strange and Norrell have gone. Is it so unlikely that you should encounter one another? That you might meet, or discover some connexion?”

“You flatter me, my lady. But the fact of the matter is I am no equal to Childermass when it comes to magic,” Segundus told her, gazing deeper still into the fireplace, which would need feeding soon enough.

Watershippe had developed a spell in the 15th century, he knew, to make deadwood grow anew and then quickly die again so that a singular log of firewood might be of indefinite use. None but Jonathan Strange’s pupil, Mr Hadley-Bright (always particularly talented in botanical magic!) had ever mastered it, not even Watershippe himself. Segundus could feel the faded energy of the wood, glowing red beyond the fire screen of his consciousness, but he could no more reach it with his magic than he could have stayed sat in his chair and touched the ceiling with his fingertips.

Miss Wintertowne fixed a forbidding look upon him. “And would it still be so, if you had been blessed with the same access to Mr Norrell’s library as he?”

“Ah,” Segundus said, and slumped. Firelight guttered upon the mantle and upon Miss Wintertowne’s face, as handsome as ever despite the touch of silver in her curling hair, the permanent downward tilt of her mouth. “That, I do not know the answer to.”

“Perhaps you should be his pupil, then,” Miss Wintertowne suggested, and Segundus dropt his cup directly upon the carpet, he was so surprized. It was empty, but she laughed behind her hand all the same. “Oh, I am so sorry, Mr Segundus! Forgive me. I had only intended to poke fun.”

It seemed that luck was on his side for once, for when Segundus stepped through the drawing room mirror that following Sunday he found Childermass already there, smoking an unconcerned clay pipe, leaning against one stone pillar amongst many other stone pillars - for it appeared they were just inside some strange and boundless coliseum, the uses of which he did not like to imagine. He inclined his head in greeting, and blew a smoke ring into the indefinite twilight.

“Oh!” said Segundus, very pleased with their success. “Well, that was easier done than I had thought it would be.”

“All my previous experience has led me to believe it should not have been,” said Childermass. He tucked away his pipe and stood himself properly upright, squaring his slouching shoulders, setting his greatcoat to rustle. He did not seem entirely glad, but then Segundus comforted himself that he never did. It was enough that he had shewn up to their meeting at all. “Well, you have asked for my company. Which way will you have us go?”

In the week since his illuminating conversation with Miss Wintertowne he had considered the matter very thoughtfully. He could not be Childermass’s pupil, but the marrow of the idea had some merit. Perhaps, he thought, Childermass might be convinced into lending his considerable book-learning to the matter of Segundus’s curriculum.

Oh, he would know all the little foundational spells, and the academic structures of them, and what small things Segundus might have neglected or not ever known to include in the first. After all, he reasoned, Childermass had had access to Mr Norrell’s grand library for most of his life, and would surely have acquired such knowledge as Segundus could only dream of having! The more he thought upon this idea the likelier it had seemed, until he had become very anxious that Childermass should agree to his proposition.

He told all of this to Childermass now, as they walked along a lonely grey path in the middle of an empty grey land.

The coliseum had been quite in the middle of no where. Two roadways stretched away from it in opposite, lonely directions; they had naturally gravitated to the one that lead towards the faint sun. The horizon dragged out forsaken for as far as their eyes could see. The only hint of movement - not colour - were the ravens, a great assemblage of them, flocking together on the barren land just beyond the road, all of them set to fluttering about and picking at the empty ground as they might pick carrion off of bone. In the far distance, Segundus could see a black tower.

Childermass was quiet for a very, very long time. Long even for a man much given to silent considerations! Segundus was all over nerves and told himself firmly that it did not matter what Childmerass said. He could get on quite well by himself. He had done so for years, after all. He told himself all this and still he let out a short sigh of relief when Childermass said, “And what will I be getting off you in return?”

“I intend to offer you - and Vinculus, if you mean to keep him near - permanent room and board, for as long as you wish to remain at Starecross.” Childermass laughed, a brief sound that made Segundus feel very suddenly concerned. “Is that not enough?”

Childermass shook his head and smiled darkly. “On the contrary, sir, it is a very generous offer. I think you do not realize how generous. Though I should not think you would want men such as Vinculus and I around your children.”

Segundus told him that this was entirely absurd. Well, he allowed, it was absurd in relation to Childermass’s person. Vinculus, he rather thought, he might have to find an alternative solution for when it came to the school year, but that was still some months coming. Some thing could be done about it when the time came, he was certain of it.

Childermass informed him that Vinculus came and went as he pleased and was often gallivanting about London visiting his numerous wives, on which matter he held no personal opinion and perhaps Segundus would like to change the subject. This was some thing of a relief to Segundus, all told, and the whole situation had turned out so much like he had hoped that he suddenly found he could not stop himself from smiling: at the ravens, at the black tower, which was much nearer now, and at Childermass keeping pace beside him.

“The matter is settled, then! Oh, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you very much indeed. I think with your help we shall establish the finest school of magic that ever was!” Segundus rather felt like rubbing his hands together, he was so pleased, but he settled for sketching a short bow to Childermass, who then inclined his own head in a nod so serious and stately it felt as though they were committing a much more solemn oath, perhaps one involving blood. 

They spoke amicably for some time, then: about when Childermass could reasonably be expected to arrive (next Tuesday, after some business in Sheffield), which academical questions Childermass might prepare himself to answer first (innumerable, but eventually winnowed down to a list of five), and of the truly abominable article upon the magical nature of ocean tides that a man named Chudderly had forced upon any soul unlucky enough to have read the latest issue of the _Friends of English Magic_ (“Of course his name is Chudderly,” said Childermass, disgusted. “A miserable name to go with a miserable work.”), until Segundus chanced a look at his pocket watch and realized it had gone midnight some two hours past. The sun was not yet set here.

They had by now reached the shadow of the black tower. It was beautiful in a very grim and stately way, as a Gothic cathedral might be. It was very well they had managed to find one another here. Perhaps, he hoped, he might be able to visit this particular place again. The tower was very intriguing, and he rather wished he could stay to find whether it had windows or entrance - for at first glance, it appeared to have neither.

He very hurriedly bid Childermass a good night, pausing only to thank him once more and to explain that he had an unusually early morning (an appointment with a prospective student), shaking his hand with such force that Childermass looked first surprized and then amused. “I do not have as early a start as you,” Childermass told him in farewell, “But while you get the amiable Mr and Mrs Sparrow, I have Vinculus.”

“It is a pitiable life you lead, sir,” Segundus told him, turning on his heel. He left Childermass there, with his black hair, in his black greatcoat, poised against the backdrop of the great black tower. It almost seemed as an image from some dream.

More than once, the servants privately confided in Segundus that their efforts to serve Mr Childermass seemed all for nought. Charles’s attempts to brush his coat, for instance, and his kind offers to trim the man’s hair were both received with much disdain. He had even once or twice, to much horror below-stairs, cleared away the tea service before Charles had even entered the room! The footmen made much the same sort of complaints. “He insists on saddling his horse himself,” said one, though this was tinged in some relief. (Childermass owned a massive black horse named Brewer that was prone to thinking fingers were treats.) The two maids, both timid, mousy things of sweet disposition, avoided him entirely now, after their initial few efforts to lay a fire in his grate had been met with difficulty and, they claimed, some amount of growling.[3]

“Well, he did spend a very many years in Mr Norrell’s service,” Segundus would sigh (to everyone except the cook), feeling privately very amused. “We cannot expect him to suddenly wish for servants of his own.”

Childermass did not seem to wish for much. He turned up at breakfast and at dinner, silent and observatory from his favourite perch at the corner of the table. Occasionally he met them in the parlour after dinner, where he declined invitations to join their games of whist and snap-dragon, instead preferring to settle in a far corner with a table set before him, where he would lay out all his little hand-drawn cards de Marseilles (surprisingly lovely with their delicate linework, for all they were inked upon all manner of paper scrap) over and over again, though what he read he did not ever share. He drifted up and down the stairs and through the hallways as if suspicious of them. Segundus more than once caught the tail end of his greatcoat disappearing into the drawing room mirror. 

The only thing Childermass wished for, he decided, were candlesticks. He read well, and often, and greedily, exchanging books in the library three times a week or more and often using up more than his fair share of the candlesticks, so that after the first month of his residence Segundus had been obliged to allot additional household funds towards the procurement of said candles. 

Vinculus was another matter entirely. It was very well that he was often enough in London, for when he was at Starecross he conducted himself terribly. 

In truth, Segundus was never entirely sure if his visits were voluntary. Vinculus was cooperative enough once Childermass had got him inside, and sometimes turned up of his own volition, stinking of gin and in high spirits, but more than once Segundus or the footmen were party to Childermass bringing him across the bridge, slung prone over the back of Brewer, as a hunter might sling a fresh kill. And he certainly never came quietly. Even if he had given himself to resignation - which always happened, given enough time - he was prone to cursing every thing he could see and name, what ever that happened to be at the time. The only thing ever designed to satisfy him more than freedom of movement was, of course, gin, and so Segundus was required to add that to his ever-growing list of household inventory.

Vinculus insisted on staying in the second-finest guest bedroom. Segundus had managed to convince him upon the one that was not intended for Mrs Lennox when she visited, but it had been a very near thing. Vinculus required a soft, comfortable counterpane. Vinculus insisted on bathing every evening, and taking tea he did not drink, and that a fire be laid in his grate at all times. In short he made every possible effort to vex servants and master alike. It was all quite enough to be getting on with. Segundus sometimes felt that if he were not soothing the servants over Childermass’s behaviors, he was promising half-days and weekend holidays in apology for Vinculus.

When Vinculus was at Starecross the two of them spent their evenings in the library - which nights the rest of them soon learned it better to avoid the library altogether, for fear of seeing things they rightly felt they should not have to see. Segundus himself got in the habit of always having a small stack of unread books at the ready in his study, in case he found himself unwilling to visit the library. Mr Honeyfoot claimed it was indecent, and complained heartily. Mrs Honeyfoot only smothered girlish giggles beneath her soft, aged hand. 

In fact, Miss Wintertowne was the only one who seemed entirely unbothered by Vinculus or Childermass's very presence. “How could I be,” she said to Segundus, when he made some attempts to comfort her after one particularly abhorrent incident. “I have seen much worse things. A naked vagrant is hardly calculated to frighten me now.”

_Sometimes he dreamed he was upon the King’s Roads. He always knew at once where he was. It could not have been any other place._

_He walked the Roads with Childermass at his side, those bleak grey pathways made of strange grey stone. Sometimes at the end of those pathways they met a pale, gaunt man with tangled hair that streamed all about his shoulders like black rainfall. He wore a circlet of polished, gleaming metal and a solemn look upon his handsome face._

_In his two pale and gaunt hands he bore two great raven’s feathers. He extended both, one to each of them. The feathers caught in the sunlight that fell so weak and grey in this land, all the dark shades of it turning purple then blue then black again. Segundus reached out to take a feather. He could feel Childermass at his side, reaching out also-_

He woke with his head pillowed upon a pile of correspondence and books. He could just make out the neat little flourishes of one of Strange’s capital _G_ ’s.

This was lately not as uncommon an occurrence as Segundus would have liked. He had returned some hours earlier from a week-long visit to London, where he had met three prospective pupils and their guardians. Of course he had only intended a glance at his papers, so he might go to bed that night thinking upon what he might devote himself to come morning, but no sooner had he sat at his desk and lit the candle had he fallen head-first into a stack of missives.

These letters had come from the initial, dreary stretch of time Strange had spent on the Peninsula, and thus were mainly chiefly concerned with how horrid the accommodations, how ghastly the food - if, indeed, Strange had often written, one could even call it food. They were deeply amusing, as some of Strange’s little miseries occasioned to be, but eventually they had dulled somewhat and he supposed he must have fallen asleep, to his deep chagrin.

And now that he was awake, he found he had no inclination at all towards finding his bed. Instead he suddenly felt that he had been cooped up all day! First at his little hotel, then in the carriage home, and then in his study. It had snowed earlier that day, and he now very much desired to see it for himself. His pocket watch told him it was not so late as he had assumed, and so he put on his greatcoat and his scarf and his hat and made his way down the stairs and out into the gardens.

They were very overgrown and very wild, as many magicians gardens tend to be. Ivy had crawled up and overtaken one side of the hall. Dead rose bushes, all their sharp stems and branches unmanicured and fierce, sat in great untamed groves. The trees bore strange fruit in the summer, and sometimes in the winter now that magic had informed them this was quite all usual behavior. There were plots of herbs and plots of vegetables and plots of decorative flowers with uncanny uses. Cobblestone pathways wound through it all, convoluted and serpentine, so that an unwary visitor might trip over a bench after some meandering turn, or find himself suddenly back where he had started, with no real certainty as to how he had got there.

It was these paths that Segundus walked that night, and it was upon one such bench after one such turn that he found Childermass.

He supposed Childermass must have heard his steps coming through the snow, for he did not startle. He merely looked up, nodded his solemn nod, and asked, “A walk this late? Not a book?”

“I have been at my book all night,” said Segundus, feeling very woeful about it. “May I sit?”

Childermass shrugged. This seemed permission enough, and he settled himself upon the bench, noting as he did how hollow was the soft skin beneath Childermass’s eyes, how grim the bent of his stern mouth. The silence that had seemed so comforting just now, along these same pathways, began to take a decidedly bleak cast.

Segundus cleared his throat. He felt compelled to speak. “I had some brief thought towards playing the pianoforte, as I always find it so very calming, but I didn’t wish to disturb anyone. Some light exercise seemed called for. I wanted to see the gardens covered in snow. It is very beautiful, is it not?” 

“You play the pianoforte?” Childermass asked, surprize drawing his eyebrows up, drawing also a hint of his queer lop-sided smile.

Segundus looked down at his hands, fine-boned and bare of gloves, laced tightly together in his lap. He had never been affluent enough to disassociate with the instrument - so often the domain of high-society ladies - but now, in the company of one who had spent much of his life serving a very rich gentleman (albeit a rather unusual and offish gentleman, who had not, he imagined, thought very highly of the musical arts or those women who pursued them) he felt rather small indeed about it.

“I do. My mother taught me when I was a boy.” Segundus told him, a detestable note of disagreeability in his voice. He met Childermass's mocking stare with his own. “I was her only child, and it pleased her very much in her later years to hear me play. She was from Veneto, and a great admirer of Antonio Vivaldi.”

“Ah,” said Childermass. He blinked once, then looked away.

He busied himself, then: pulling his clay cutty and his small brass tinderbox from some inner pocket, so quick and so gracefully it appeared like nothing so much as some yellow-curtain magician’s sleight of hand, and inspecting the pipe’s chamber. Upon finding it already filled, he lit a match and began to smoke, pausing every so often to tilt his head back and let forth great streams of vapor that lifted and curled around the bare branches of the sleeping trees that guarded their bench. It was chill enough that breath escaped Segundus in white plumes, too. He found himself preoccupied with them, keenly studying their structures as they appeared and evanesced.

Childermass made a thoughtful, rumbling sort of sound and then said, “My mother was fond of the tin whistle. She would play it some nights, after supper.”

Segundus cast a sidelong look at Childermass, who was staring straight ahead without expression. He could not help but to ask (this being the first time Childermass had offered any little bit of information about himself so willingly!), “Was she very skilled? Not that it matters, of course. My own mother could not have had a worse ear for music. It surprized her very much that I should have any natural inclination towards it.”

“No,” Childermass said, slowly, as though he were peering into some deep well of himself. “No, I don’t believe she was. But it made all us kids laugh, which I think was mainly what she was after. I don’t remember much of her. She weren’t around often, and she died of fever when I was still very young.”

Segundus was at first aghast, and then he was sad, and then he turned to Childermass and said, with all the nonchalance he could muster, “And did she teach you to play?”

Childermass barked out a surprized laugh, turning somewhat on the bench to regard him with an inquisitive, ironical air quite unlike the melancholy Segundus had formerly sensed gathering about him - settling on all his hard angles like London fog might catch on the carved little effigies that sometimes decorate it’s more magnificent buildings.

“She taught me many things. None of them were that. Do I seem to you the sort of man who would enjoy playing the tin bloody whistle?” he asked, slow and full of rarely-seen humor. “You are a very strange creature indeed.”

“Anyone might enjoy the tin whistle! I do not believe there is any law against it,” Segundus assured him, and promptly caught a breeze so chill that his shoulders shook and he shivered, making himself as small and warm as he could inside his greatcoat.

Childermass abruptly stood, then, and in that same swift motion tapped charred tobacco dregs into the barren garden bed beside their bench with one ink-stained finger. The pipe and the small brass tinderbox went back in his breast pocket. He shrugged one shoulder towards the Hall when Segundus merely regarded him from the bench, head tilted against the wind, curious.

“I intend to make tea. I will share the pot with you, if you agree to leave all your thoughts of the tin whistle outside. Perhaps a piece of Cook’s marzipan will shake something loose in you? I do not believe she will notice a small bit missing from her pantry. Indeed, if she does, I will inform her Vinculus has been at it again.”

He told Segundus all of this in a voice that suggested laughter - though his mouth was grave, and his eyes were black as pitch, and his shoulders seemed to bear some great weight which had appeared all of a sudden, or perhaps Segundus had not previously noticed it was there. In fact upon his face was an expression Segundus had never seen before. He looked upon it now and could not figure it at all. He shivered again to try.

Segundus admitted that tea and marzipan did sound very nice, though he could not make such promises as Childermass demanded, to which Childermass - finally! - laughed and acquiesced, saying he would endeavour not to mind, since Segundus had just consented to thieve marzipan with him and that was a bargain he could not pass by. Thusly agreed, he got himself up too and followed Childermass down the winding path back to the dark hall, all their shared footsteps muffled by the snow.

1“Some weeks ago I came out at the end of a narrow bridge that had caught quite a lot of rainwater, at least a foot of it. I had not intended to be there at all, but as I am sure you well know, once you are upon the King’s Roads there can be no small difficulty finding a way home. I began to walk to the nearest embankment, but the water was so murky and dark, I did not notice them until I tripped and nearly fell.”

Childermass paused here, as they got themselves up a short ladder and down again to a small draw-bridge. Segundus, his boots and gloves wet with grime, was all on tenter-hooks waiting for the rest of the telling. His mind conjured up a most horrific series of images, each more macabre than the last: piles of human bones set in bundles like fire kindling, finger bones and ribs gleaming underwater like polished stones from a river bed, and here or there the suggestion of a toothy, grinning skull. But what Childermass had to say was somehow even worse!

“The bridge was covered in shoes. Hundreds of them, and all very old. It looked as though a shoemaker’s entire stock had transported itself there and spilled all across the ground. They were all many centuries old. They had been in the water so long that at first it did not occur to me what they must be until I picked one up to look at it.”

“What did you do then?” Segundus asked, amazed.

“I journeyed back the way I had come and returned to my room at the inn,” said Childermass, looking at him as though he were very stupid indeed. “I like my shoes where they are.”[return to text]

2Miss Wintertowne did not always make beautiful things. Sometimes she sewed all over black and grey, hideous creatures with crabbed legs and watchful countences. She stitched castles made of thistles and thorns; ladies with delicate, iridescent beetles for hair; crowds of merry-makers with bloody feet and great pools of it spilling all across the dance floor. Shocking things. Things that made some of the more excitable servants - to say nothing of poor Charles! - shy away and cross themselves, for Miss Wintertowne made no secret of her creations and sometimes left them laid out here or there so that the unwary household traveler might stumble upon them and shriek.

If pressed, Segundus would have confessed that sometimes the works unsettled him. He thought Miss Wintertowne must have known it, for she often seemed to embroider more commonplace things in his presence.)[return to text]

3The only member of the household who did not have any complaints regarding Childermass’s conduct was the cook, who told Segundus - when Segundus had never asked at all! - that she thought him a fine figure of a man, with very good calves, and if she were twenty years younger she might have had a go at it herself.[return to text]


	3. Chapter 3

The winter passed quickly. There was much to do, but not much light to do it by, and so the craftsmen and artisans Segundus had hired to finish the dormitories and common areas often had come and gone by two in the afternoon. They would gather in the dining room at half past six for dinner - himself, Mr and Mrs Honeyfoot, Miss Wintertowne, and often Childermass now, if he were not shut up in the library striving to translate the Raven King’s word. Vinculus plainly refused to dine with them all, preferring instead a tray brought up to his room, or on occasion to dine in the company of the cook, who he was driving to a nervous distraction and who could often be persuaded to part with whole meat pies for the return of her solitude.

They were lively dinners. The liveliest Segundus could remember ever having, in fact, for he had been an only child, privately tutored. Excepting his years at university - and even then he had been given to solitude, however personally cultivated or not - he had always lived quite alone, with perhaps the occasional visit from his landlady or fellow boarders to whet his social appetite. And so, as is often the case with gentlemen much given to lengthy solitudes, he sometimes found he did not know what to do with all this liveliness.

And what an odd company they all made! Mrs Honeyfoot was much given to relating past public indecencies at all the grand balls she had attended as a young person, which were all very amusing and plainly calculated to make Miss Wintertowne smile. Mr Honeyfoot often spoke of himself and Mrs Honeyfoot’s three grown daughters, which was often as entertaining as it was repetitious. He also often spoke at length of magical law, which was entertaining only to himself and to Childermass.

Childermass, when he deigned speak at all, was chiefly concerned with the goings-on at Parliament, or what ever interesting section of the local newspaper he had read that morning. Miss Wintertowne was herself keenly interested in government, and had many strong opinions on all manner of subjects that were quite radical. This had the unforeseen side effect of giving herself and Childermass a stepping-off point, as it were, and some nights the arguing got loud enough that Mr and Mrs Honeyfoot - who by this point had learned not to interrupt the two of them - would begin to give beseeching looks in Segundus’s general direction.

Segundus himself was prone towards a pleasing disposition. That is to say he wished to please everyone, and so was not much help in dissolving these little arguments. It would be correct to say he felt sympathy for them both. And he rather suspect that Childermass and Miss Wintertowne both were only arguing for the sake of arguing. If they each enjoyed behaving so badly, he felt, then he would leave them to it.

This seemed to rile Childermass’s ire more than any thing, though Segundus could not figure quite why. Sometimes a black mood seemed to take him and he became very disagreeable upon any and all topics the group wished to discuss. This in turn made Miss Wintertowne very cross and very vocal about being cross. More than once she ended dessert with a long, uncomfortable diatribe against men and their overall failings, for which sentiment no one could fault her - Segundus himself being too shrinking; Mr and Mrs Honeyfoot too kind; Childermass too in agreement, though he himself had been the cause of all the ire in the first place.

A month into this new living arrangement they all seemed to come to a natural and unanimous conclusion, and so began to formally dine together only twice a week: Mondays and Fridays. The rest of the time it was every man or woman for herself - though of course the Honeyfoots continued to dine together. Most often Miss Wintertowne preferred the society of a book to Segundus and Childermass, and so naturally they gravitated towards one another’s company, taking their dinner together in Segundus’s little wood-panelled study or, less often, at a long table in the library, surrounded by books and papers.

It was during these late winter dinners that they began to talk more easily than they had ever done. This was a continual delight for Segundus, who had never in his life enjoyed such a truly equitable meeting of minds. Childermass, he consoled himself, seemed at the very least content with their little salons of two, which was all he felt he could hope for.

They spoke of the goings-on in London and Yorkshire. They argued over Paris Ormskirk’s overall usefulness in the canon of English magic. They related any small successful spells they had each achieved. They considered what magical uses various colours of ribbon might have. They pored over the copies Childermass labouriously made of the writing that graced Vinculus’s skin. They wondered to each other what the words would mean, and what that might mean for England. They talked of any new books or articles that they had both enjoyed or found some amount of issue with. In short they talked about every thing two magicians and men of the world may talk about, and both were happier for it. 

On occasion, after the dinner plates had been taken away, one of them might produce a bottle of French or Portuguese wine and in lieu of wine glasses (which Segundus was not inclined to keep in his study) they would spill the stuff into their empty tea cups, hand-painted with delicate cobalt birds, a gift from Mrs Lennox’s father to her mother many, many years ago. 

After some amount of wine had been consumed it would inevitably, carelessly splash upon the dark pocked wood of Segundus’s desk and sometimes upon his personal papers, too, which event pained him deeply but that Childermass said was auspicious. Sometimes he attempted to trick Segundus into believing he could read wine stains as well as tea leaves or tarot, and sometimes he thusly entertained by proving that he could with a lengthy list of dire, outrageous pronouncements about every one from the Lord Hawkesbury to the local cheesemonger, each prediction more absurd than the last, until Segundus fell about in scandalized laughter and Childermass settled back in his chair, decidedly self-satisfied.

They each explored the Roads less and less lately, preferring instead the warmth of the Hall and all its creature comforts, though Segundus would not have been surprized in the least to find out Childermass still went alone, on occasion. After all, there were some amount of nights when he wished to labour over his book, which was nearing completion, or his autumn curriculum, which was not. And Childermass had never been the sitting down type. The man still had a tendency to disappear without any warning, sometimes for days at a time, and on these occasions Segundus found he felt strangely bereft and would come back to himself sulkily pushing his jugged hare or his tartlets about his plate with his fork. On those nights he went to bed early and discomfited, and utterly refused to think why.

And so as the weeks passed their conversation grew easier and their camaraderie even greater. 

He soon discovered that Childermass was both very learned and very opinionated upon all sorts of subjects, not all of them magical in nature. He was not very given towards openness, but as their friendship grew so did their ease. While Childermass was still not much inclined towards discussing his past, or his decades of service to Gilbert Norrell, he did deign share the occasional story and thus Segundus began to piecemeal together a biography of the man, a clearer picture of his new companion.[1]

And of course Childermass asked him all manner of questions about himself! Why Childermass should wish to know any thing about him remained a mystery; then, he felt, why he should wish to know any thing about Childermass was itself a mystery to Childermass, and he thought the both of them very foolish indeed.

One night Childermass asked him what ultimately had compelled him to decide which young magicians he wished to extend an offer to for schooling. Segundus could not help but warm to the topic immediately, proud as he already was of his pupils, for all they would not even begin their schooling until some more months past.

“It took some doing! Doting parents are often given to flights of fancy in regards to their own children, as you well know, and so it was no small effort verifying the abilities of all our new students. As chance would have it, our first pupil was also the first whose parents you induced to write. You might remember Miss Lucy Coffin, of Osmotherly?”

Childermass had been looking somewhat disinterested, as he was sometimes inclined, but at the mention of Lucy Coffin a smile spread all up one side of his face like a vine. He said he did remember her, very well. “The girl is a brat. Did her father tell you what had compelled him to seek my advice?”

“He did not mention it, no. She struck me as a lovely and polite young lady, when I went to meet them.” Segundus thought upon this for a moment, and hummed. “Though I suppose I might be mistaken. I sometimes am. But, no - I am not so bad a judge of character as that! Nor are you, I think. You were the one who encouraged her father to seek me out, after all.”

Childermass gave a dark laugh. “Do not get your hopes up too much, now. The girl is a terror.”

“I dare say you will tell me all there is to know,” said Segundus, though he rather thought Childermass might be exaggerating things. Lucy Coffin had seemed nothing but sweet, of a calm and pleasant disposition. She had performed a very nice bit of magic for him, to the obvious delight of her indulgent mother: there had been a vase upon the sideboard filled with wild flowers, the petals of which she had commanded to rise up into the air of their own volition and form strange, kaleidoscoping patterns which twisted and turned. Of course she had not known how to reattach the petals to their flowers, and so a servant had been obliged to clean up the mess. But it had been very beautiful regardless.

“I had stopped at a tavern for dinner. I was minding my own business, of course,” and here Childermass directed such an ironical smirk at Segundus that he laughed out loud behind his hand. “When I heard some poor gentlemen the next table over telling his friends at great length all about the sorry state of his household. At first I was of the mind that this man had perhaps talked himself into believing his young daughter could do magic. She was fourteen and quite given to mischief, if what the poor bastard had to say was true. But I made further inquiries and what I found convinced me of her abilities.

Henry Coffin has two children: a lad of sixteen, who you may have met, and your Miss Lucy. There had for some time been a quarrel between the two as to whether or not the lad’s feet stank. Lucy claimed they reeked to high heaven. Her brother made many protestations. The argument had gone on for weeks by the time I met Henry Coffin. I assume it would have gone on for many more, too, if his daughter had not taken it upon herself to fix things in her favor.”

“What did she do?” Segundus asked, feeling all on the edge of his seat.

“Oh, it was a fine bit of magic. Very fine, in my opinion. Though I do not think her brother would agree with me! The girl had enchanted every pair of her brother’s shoes to run away and hide every time he approached him. Henry Coffin informed me that when he had left that day to meet his friends, they had all been on the roof, shaking like beaten dogs.”

Segundus stifled a laugh into his hand. “Better for children to remain children as long as they can. I have every confidence that in time they will all learn to control their abilities.”

“You continually astonish me,” said Childermass, and rolled his eyes heavenward for a moment, as if to shew fully how much Segundus did astonish him.

They subsided in conversation for long moments, then. Childermass poured them each a new glass of wine; Segundus lit another candle. Childermass returned to his newspaper; Segundus found a particularly amusing passage in a letter from Strange regarding a donkey and a much-reviled book.

Childermass’s fingers, when they were not occupied turning pages, were engaged in coaxing out a large knot that had gathered itself in his hair, behind his left ear where he often pushed the dark curling mass of it in quiet, studious moments when reading took a place of importance over finding a queue. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, Segundus had noted, though it was likelier that he might observe one such knotted length of hair of an evening and by morning Childermass would have removed it during his nightly toilet.

Segundus found his fingers itched to help. He cleared his throat instead. 

“Get on with it,” said Childermass.

“I beg your pardon?” said Segundus.

“Whatever it is you intend to say. However much you may believe yourself a canny fellow, I can assure you that that is not the case at all.”

“You are quite mistaken,” said Segundus, feeling rather sharp. Childermass was surely the most vexing man who had ever existed! “I had not intended to say any thing. In fact, I think I wish to go to bed early tonight.”

Childermass cast him a pentrating, vexed sort of look. “Suit yourself,” he said.

He was not often given to such bald untruths, and yet, as he turned and left Childermass to the wine and the candles and the papers, he could not find himself ashamed at all for it. 

It had been a passing thought, so immediate he had felt at first he had no option but to voice it. His mind had turned, as it so often did, to the mystery of the Roads. What Segundus had wished to say was thus: “Have you ever wondered where the Roads might take you?” He had regretted the foolish question before he had even uttered it. It was a question so prosaic as to be one of the first questions a magician asked, upon learning the history of the Raven King. 

Childermass, he felt, would have sighed and told him what every other person he had ever set the question to had: namely, that the Roads led into Faerie, and into Hell, and into anywhere else a magician might wish to go. He had only wondered, in a moment of fancy quite unlike himself, what it meant that the Roads had led him to Childermass, all those weeks ago.

A great commotion was coming from the library. Segundus and Miss Wintertowne were both roused from the parlour by the racket, abandoning their lists of which books they considered might be essential for their young charges. Three of the maids and the cook too were compelled to investigate, from whichever corners of the hall they had occupied, and now a whole assemblage of them wavered at the bottom of the stair case, the maids whispering madly amongst themselves and Miss Wintertowne and the cook soberly discussing whether or not it sounded like a bloody murder.

It certainly sounded bloody. Vinculus was shouting something shrill and indistinct, muffled through the closed library door. Childermass too was speaking - not quite in a shout, but at a volume far above his usual drawl, so that the syllables reached their ears all nebulous and unclear. There was an erratic, strange tapping upon the floorboards, and an occasional sharp crack, the origins of which were uncertain.

“Oh, Mr Segundus, sir,” said the cook, looking very distressed, “What if that villain Vinculus is hurting Mr Childermass?”

“Mr and Mrs Honeyfoot have gone to town,” Miss Wintertowne informed him, pursing her lips as though she wished to smile. “As the only remaining gentleman of the house, surely it falls on you to investigate whether or not a murder is currently taking place?”

Segundus considered this for a moment. He sighed. “I do not think it would take him so very long to achieve a murder. But yes, I suppose it is my duty to go.”

He climbed the stairs with no small amount of trepidation. He pushed open the door feeling, he thought, like a man going to the gallows must, and immediately breathed a sigh of relief. All was well.

Vinculus was the source of the stomping - naked to the waist and dancing nearby the fire like a devil. He had stopped his caterwauling by this point, but still he seemed unable to stop his childlike clapping, jumping all about and smacking his hands together with glee.

Childermass was sunk into his particular favourite chair with his head in his hands. His shoulders were shaking.

“Childermass?” said Segundus, stepping forward, feeling suddenly concerned for his friend. He went some steps forward very quickly, and laid his hand gently upon Childermass’s shoulder. “Childermass, what is the matter?”

“He has done it!” crowed Vinculus, and then executed a number of very odd dance steps. It seemed a great kindness, suddenly, that he had kept his breeches on this day. “He has read me! Part of me, at least. A single word! A single word, magician, but he has done it!”

All his breath left him in a rush, leaving him quite lightheaded. He tightened his hold on Childermass’s thin shoulder, warm through only waistcoat and undershirt, and felt the man sway, a gentle rock that seemed to convey nothing short of complete astonishment. “Oh, Childermass!” he said, himself astonished beyond reason. “Oh, I hardly know what to say. I had the utmost faith you could achieve it, given time, but you have done it so quickly. And now that you know where you must start, surely every thing else will more easily follow?

Childermass made a muffled sound of agreement, or possibly protestation, he was not sure. His shoulders shook more. Segundus realized he was laughing, had been laughing this whole time. He felt a wave of such directed tenderness that he could not help but to lift his hand and brush a bit of Childermass’s wild, tangled hair behind his ear.

Vinculus danced while he put on his yellowed shirt, and his dirty waistcoat, and his frayed coat. He danced while he set his raggedy hat back upon his head. And then he danced out of the room and down the stairs, where he surely danced upon some poor lady of the house or another, for there was a high-pitched shriek and then the sound of the front door slamming. 

Childermass looked up at that, first to the doors, which swung shut without the impediment of dancing books, then to Segundus, who was by this time smiling madly at nothing in particular. At the sheaves of handwritten foolscap upon the desk, at the fireplace, at Childermass himself. Indeed, he felt he could not have helped his smile any more than he could have contrived to stop breathing, so proud was he of his friend, of what he had managed. There was a vast feeling inside of him that was growing ever larger: spreading into and filling up all the dark, dull corners of him, ebullient and sweetly fizzing. 

At last, he thought. At last we will have some answers! A direction to point ourselves in, perhaps. For it was all very well to be planning to go ahead as they were, but there was uncertainty in that decisiveness, too. All this time, in the back of his mind, he had wondered if perhaps they had chosen a wrong path - if perhaps the Raven King had intended something entirely different, and Childermass’s final translation would come to late for them to change their course. He had wondered this out loud before, of course, over wine and candlelight some weeks before. Childermass had been very adamant in responding that, much as he respected the King’s word, he would not live his life beholden to his whims. No, they would continue on as they had been, he had said. It would not do to worry. They must have faith in themselves.

“You think too much, sir,” Childermass told him, and stood.

Childermass was taller than him by a head at least, and while thin, was larger all over. And so when he stood, and when he reached up to press his hand against Segundus’s, keeping it where it was upon his own shoulder, Segundus braced himself somewhat, for what event he could not say.

They were both smiling like madmen, now. Childermass slid his hand up and up, from Segundus’s hand to arm to neck to jaw, and put his thumb sweetly against the indent of Segundus’s great smile, stroking his cheek once. Such a simple gesture that seemed so thoughtfully made, for Childermass’s eyes were as black and keen as they always were, tracing the delight on Segundus’s face, and his blush, too, which had appeared just then without any prompting from Segundus himself.

He turned his head blindly, hardly aware of what he was doing, and kissed the pad of Childermass’s thumb. He imagined he would taste ink, and licked his lips to see if he could. Childermass made a low, dark sound, and the hand upon Segundus’s shoulder tightened so much that he now made a low, dark sound of his own.

The front door slammed open and then shut again. There was a brief, mad cackle of laughter and then the sound of tapping shoes upon the staircase. 

“I should return to Miss Wintertowne,” Segundus said, tearing his eyes from Childermass’s and feeling as he did so that he tore too something uniquely precious away from himself. 

“I have brought the gin, magicians! We shall make a toast to my continued health!” Vinculus cried from the hallway, and by the time he had reached the door Segundus was already halfway out of it, rushing through some vague congratulations as he brushed past, to the stairs.

Childermass sounded very calm when he responded, “You keep your gin in the stables? I agree with you that that is where it belongs. Yet I find have a number of questions that now sorely need answering.”

Of course, just when things are going right, Segundus could have told you, is when they almost certainly begin to go wrong again.

To say it in brief: they had each had a thought towards attempting to find that lonely black tower again. The one they had come upon some time ago, set into a vast, barren stretch of the King’s Roads. Segundus had wondered at it, one night, saying how dearly he wished they could find it again. Childermass said he had stayed for some time, walking around and around the base of it, searching for a way inside. It had been bare of windows and of doors, he said, and it did not have any immediately obvious function.

They had mutually agreed they must do their best to find it again, and to Segundus’s joy and Childermass’s obvious satisfaction, they had stepped through the drawing room mirror quite in front of it! And there had been a door! Which Segundus, feeling rather confused about the state of things between himself and Childermass, had immediately contrived to open, in order to prove some point (he could not say what that point was) to Childermass.

The door was a door to Faerie. It was most unfortunate. Anyone, Segundus said later, might have made the same mistake.

“No, they couldn’t,” said Childermass.

_He was on the King’s Roads with Childermass. They were so often there - they had just been here - they were always here._

_Childermass had a great raven feather tucked into the brim of his hat, so that it extended down into the tangles of his hair and glinted all the colours a raven’s feather may glint. He looked very wild this way. He seemed to melt into all the strange grey stone that surrounded them, as though sinking into the landscape himself. He seemed as part of everything as the sky or the stone. He was smiling at Segundus, the lop-sided smile with the queer dark eyes._

_Segundus reached out to touch him. He could not have done anything else. He found he had tucked his own great raven feather into the sleeve of his shirt, where it tickled the soft skin of his inner arm and the sharp point of the quill dug into his wrist when he placed his hand upon Childermass’s cheek._

_When Childermass kissed him it felt inevitable. When Childermass kissed him it was as though he was reaching out to some thing that was finally within his grasp, some thing he had been longing to hold for such a long time he did not know how to begin now that he had it. When Childermass kissed him, he gasped and it seemed the sky gasped along with him. When Childermass kissed him -_

He awoke and promptly wished he had not.

He could not move - could not even begin to think of moving!, for some massive weight of magic crushed him flat on his back. The magic itself was not unfamiliar. Indeed, it felt just as the hall had in those final days of Lady Pole’s enchantment: oppressive, confounding, enfolding every part of him from every angle. This was in excess even of that, a terrible deluge of sensation that prickled and burned and sent every part of his body to shaking. He could not say whether he was standing or laying down, or perhaps floating in some vast, black space that pulled at him from every direction. Or maybe he was falling through a ghastly and airless void and would soon hit upon the ground and be dashed to pieces. He could hear terrible noises wringing from his throat but he could do nothing to stop them, just as he could not open his eyes or lift his hand, just as he could not breathe. 

“Segundus,” hissed Childermass, somewhere near, “Segundus! You must open your eyes!”

Childermass sounded rather urgent about something. Segundus contrived to let out a sound of plain disagreement, for it was hardly Childermass who was so roundly abused by the atmosphere, and in response, Childermass took him by the shoulders and shook him roughly.

Segundus opened his eyes to glare. “Think again, sir,” he managed, frostily.

“You must get up,” Childermass commanded him, as near to frantic as Segundus had ever seen him. His face was so very pale that Segundus noted for the first time in their reacquaintance the long thin scar on his cheek, a graceful crescent of silvery scar tissue. He had seen the wound on the day of the Restoration. He remembered now how little Childermass had minded it, bloody and raw though it looked, with all the watercolour-blooms of blood drying upon his collar. It seemed very foolish that he had not thought to look for it since! Now he felt he could hardly look for anything else. 

He reached out as if in a dream to press his fingertips to the thin line of it, but Childermass thrust his hand away, snarling. “Get yourself up. We must leave this place at once.”

“It is Faerie,” Segundus realized, the knowledge coming to him all at once, and found the strength in his excitement to get himself up on his elbows. He discovered he was lying prone on his back and that Childermass was on his knees beside him, looking very cross. “That is why the magic is so familiar. I had not thought, that is to say, before, at Starecross - but this is so very muted, compared to that. Oh, how extraordinary! We are in Faerie, Childermass!”

“Unfortunately,” said Childermass, from what seemed a great distance. He sounded terribly put out about it, but then Childermass often sounded that way, and Segundus had long learned not to let it trouble him.

It was, disappointingly, rather like any other forest Segundus had seen, though the plants grew to magnificent proportions. Some ten feet away a thicket of roses stretched as tall and wide as any tree, gigantic petals - red, pink, yellow that blushed - gently moving with the breeze, wrapping themselves together into tangles of thorns and choking vines. Near his own elbow a cluster of tiny horse-chestnuts sprouted, as perfectly formed and noble as any of their larger kin. They were in a small clearing, the two of them, atop a bed of what at first seemed a thick and uncomfortable moss but upon further scrutiny revealed itself to be a knoll of miniature, sweet-smelling lilac.

Childermass grabbed him roughly by both forearms and pulled so that Segundus was forced to halt his inspections and scramble upward, lest his arms be ripped off at the root. They swayed together, knees knocking. Segundus felt quite light-headed and told Childermass so in some consternation.

“I feel it too,” Childermass admitted, holding Segundus steady and upright until Segundus pushed at him, discomfited. He breathed hard out through his nose. “We must leave immediately. As soon as you are able to perform the spell. I do not think I can bring you with me, but if you do not get a move on, I might be forced to try.”[2],

“Might we not take a look around this clearing, at least? It seems a shame to find ourselves here and not have a look around.”

Segundus knew well how precarious their current situation was. If they were to happen upon a fairy! It did not bear thinking about. While individual members of the race had certainly helped wayward magicians in the past - for a price! - they had also caused considerable mischief. He feared if word had got round of their incidental role in the demise of the fairy that had ruled Lost-Hope, that any kin (for all fairies are related in some way or another) they encountered might not take very kindly to their presence. Still it seemed a shame to cut their visit so short! Segundus longed terribly for a closer look at the little copse of trees growing nearby Childermass's left boot. He supposed the magic was driving him to some distraction.

“No.” Childermass reclaimed his grip on Segundus’ arm, digging his fingers in so that Segundus winced. “Don’t be a bloody idiot.”

“ _Sir_ ,” Segundus said, shocked. “Release me at once.”

Childermass looked down at his hand, where his ink-stained fingernails were clawed into the brown wool of Segundus’s coat, and made a sound of faint wonder, as though he had not noticed until that very moment what he had done. “I am sorry for it,” he murmured, unhanding Segundus. He stepped away as if in a daze. “The magic is affecting me much more strongly than I had thought.”

Segundus nodded at him in understanding and straightened his coat upon his shoulders. “We shall go at once, then. I suppose I am finding it very disagreeable myself.”

This was a half-truth, for Segundus was growing more acclimated to the environment by the second, but he did not wish to argue with Childermass any further. Being entirely in Faerie, as opposed to half-in Faerie and half-out, as he had been those last weeks of Lady Pole’s enchantment, was an altogether more pleasant experience. But Childermass, he remembered suddenly, feeling somewhat embarrassed he had not thought of this sooner, had been even more troubled by the excess of Faerie magic than he. They would go immediately. Segundus comforted himself with the thought that if these were to be his only moments in Faerie, at least they had been memorable ones.

Childermass nodded at him in silent thanks and together they stepped over the tiny tree trunks that grew all across the clearing as plentiful as grass blades, and then the rotting stems of what appeared some gigantic root vegetables, knee-high, until they were directly beneath one rose, directly in its immense shadow. The cloying scent of decay and delicate, powdery pollen clung to his nose and made him sneeze. His head, already aching, began to throb. Childermass cleared his throat. Segundus closed his eyes and reached inside himself.

They were pressed so tightly together beneath the shadow of the flower that Segundus could feel it when Childermass began to tremble.

“It is not working,” Segundus said finally, because it was not. The spell vibrated within him but would not disperse. This shadow did not call him to home, as shadows were lately wont to do. The Roads were once more far from their reach. He could not help but think that, from a purely academical standpoint, this was a very fascinating development indeed. The shadows upon the roads were not earthly either and yet _they_ functioned as doors between realms! Why should Faerie be any different? (He did not put these questions to Childermass. It seemed a great unkindness just then.)

“No,” Childermass agreed, voice tight, still shuddering with great effort. “It is not.”

“Perhaps another shadow?” Segundus suggested, for lack of better idea.

Childermass grunted in agreement and together they paced the perimeter of the clearing, moving from shadow to shadow - the shade of a towering thistle, the underside of an impossible foxglove - until finally Childermass stood quite still and narrowed his eyes. “We must find water, then. And we must find it quickly.”

Segundus nodded. Any reflective surface would do, of course, but water was the likeliest source, here in the forest. “Unless you might make it rain?” He did not himself know the spell.

“No,” Childermass said, after a moment’s consideration. “I should not like to try some thing so great. Not in this place. It does not feel right. I do not believe it would turn out as we might hope.”

Segundus had the most peculiar notion that he could have done it, if only he thought of it long enough. He could feel the water gathering overhead in the clouds. He could feel the thirst of the lilac and of the trees that were as small and plentiful as grasses; the steady sipping of the roses, their roots sunk deep, drawing off some wellspring far down in the wet squirming soil. There was still some dew drops weighing down leaves here or there. If only he could call it all to him! He could make a rainstorm finer than any either of them had seen before, he was almost certain of it. But this was a passing fancy, he told himself. He had so far been unable to do the basest of elemental magics, and in any case, Faerie magic - and every other sort of magic there was in the world, in truth - had always affected him more strongly than most.

“I think we might do well to go this way,” he told Childermass, pointing into the forest, and Childermass did not argue the issue. He would think this feeling strange later, when he thought of it at all. After all, he had always enjoyed a good sense of direction. For now he pushed the massive, sweet-smelling bonnet of a foxglove aside and stepped into the Faerie wilderness with his jaw set in determination and Childermass following close behind.

Deeper into the woods the gigantic flowers gave way to regular-sized trees and greenery without much fanfare, until it seemed they might have found their way back to England already, so familiar was the scenery. It was late spring here, as it had been late spring in Yorkshire. The leaves were all balanced on the edge of yellow and green, and sweetly warm air filtered down through their canopy, casting bright angles upon the forest floor, with its carpeting of moldering leaves and dead or dying branches. However, in nearly every other respect this was not at all alike any English forest Segundus had ever seen, nor did he wish to.

The air itched. It fell cloying and heavy like wool on soft bare skin, and was so all over uncomfortable that Segundus found his shoulders twitching and rolling as though he might displace it, as if the whole substance of it were some living net made of insects draped across his skin. And that queer, heavy air certainly did not smell like any forest the whole world over. In fact, it smelled like a peat bog. Then it smelled like a millinery, then suddenly of newly-trimmed grass. Then it was a freshly-baked apple pudding with clotted cream and vanilla and rich warm cinnamon. Segundus had no innate talent for identifying such scents, beyond a wrinkled nose and a round distaste for the more pungent odors, but Childermass turned out to be quite adept at it, though he took no clear joy from the exercise.

“Fresh-baled hay with a bit of mace, that is,” he would murmur, as though to himself. “A lady’s lip salve - dried roses and beeswax. Bloody... wet wool and hickory.”

Despite his commentary (which Segundus suspected was more meant to keep him from running off to find the source of each scent than for Childermass’s own benefit) and the muted agitation that still pulled at the corners of his eyes and upon the silver scar that graced his cheek, Childermass walked straight and tall, as if he hardly noticed their current predicament - except for some few moments when he became obliged to place his hand upon this or that tree, as though perhaps checking that they still existed. His glances were quick and casual. He appeared profoundly unconcerned with their surroundings. He could have been perambulating through the streets of London, for all he seemed to care.

Inside that head, however! Oh, Segundus knew by now what an entirely different story it was. It was so entirely different that sometimes he wondered how any one could ever look upon Childermass and think him common, for Childermass had lately made very little pretense towards being any thing other than what he was. And what he was, indisputably, was a magician. But he was a scholar too, and also a sneak. Childermass was of that enviable make of man - the sort who can find himself quite at home no matter what the circumstance. His mind was like, Segundus sometimes thought, a well-oiled printing press. It was a meticulously ordered file drawer. It was a wound pocket watch, or a hand-drawn tarot. It was labyrinthine. Segundus admired it, even as he shrank from it, even as he invariably found himself very obliged indeed for it.

Indeed, if their situation had not been quite so dire, he felt he would be pestering Childermass at every turn for his opinion on every thing from the rocks, which he had the uncanny suspicion might bleed if they were kicked hard enough, to the occasional cluster of daffodils that sprouted here or there, which inspired in him a foreign and immeasurable sorrow so deep and so unyielding, it seemed as though it had flattened every good thing he had contained within himself and that he might never know happiness again - but which emotion passed the second he tore his eyes away. As it were, Childermass marched them through the brush without a word exchanged between them beyond noting the more unusual scents they encountered.

They were some two hours into the woods when finally he stopped and suggested rather plainly that they rest, saying that Segundus had begun to look as flushed and delicate as any high society lady after too long on the dance floor.

Segundus did not argue the point, though he would dearly have liked to. Childermass was right. He was not at all accustomed to this amount of physical exertion! His calves ached, his cheeks burned hot, and his feet ached with blisters in his impractical shoes. He had the queerest sense that each step they had so far taken had been somehow halved even as they had taken them, as a length of string might be cut in half by a very sharp knife, so that all their efforts were made half-useless and all the more labourious. But he did not mention this to Childermass either. Instead he sat thankfully on a log, stretched his legs out with a sigh, and wished heartily for a long drink of water. 

Childermass crouched down beside him, uncaring of how his greatcoat dragged against the dirt and decaying leaves.

“I do not think it will be much further,” he said, quietly. He seemed to be in some discomfort still, for his face remained drawn and white. The exercise had pinkened his lips and cheeks, at least. There was a fine sheen of sweat upon his dark brow.

Segundus smiled at him. “It is only a mile more,” he agreed, because it was. The water was there, a great pool of it, and it was clean. How he knew this he could not have said.

Childermass snorted as though amused, and rocked back on his heels. He resembled nothing more than some great bird of prey in his dark coat and raggedy hat. Segundus comforted himself with the idea that any fae they chanced to encounter might be so alarmed by Childermass’s person that they might not give them any trouble at all.

Childermass stood again, pacing across the small patch of open earth that stretched between Segundus’s log and the nearest tree. He moved about for several minutes, head twisting this way and that, eyeing up their surroundings in a way that made very clear he did not agree with them. Finally he settled, leant with his back against the trunk of some great tree. Thus propped, he reached into his inner pocket and fetched up his pipe and a small, plain leather pouch filled with tobacco.

Segundus watched him fill and tamp and light, the last of which was achieved with a muttered word and a snap of the fingers. A new spell they had devised just last month! It seemed even longer ago than that now, the longer they were here in this strange realm with all its strange trappings. He kindly refrained from mentioning that the snap was wholly unnecessary, except perhaps as theatre.[3]

The smoke curled itself about Childermass like a mantle, the smell such familiar succor that if Segundus had closed his eyes he might have been able to imagine they were again ensconced in his own small study, talking of some spell or other, teacups filled with wine and books enough between them.

“Have you noticed there aren’t any animals in this forest?” Segundus murmured instead, feeling rather silly about it but feeling he must make note of it. It was plain fact. The forest was silent, free of rustling bush or the barest whispers of bird-song. The log he had situated himself upon was entirely clean of crawling insects. The daylight was fading quickly, and much of the warmth along with it, and still there were no chirps from hasty crickets. 

Childermass nodded. “I have. I do not like to think why, or what that could mean for us if we are here very much longer. Come on, now. We are losing light.”

Segundus, agreeing, pushed himself up. Childermass put away his pipe and his tobacco, pushing past Segundus to lead the way once more. He trailed smoke-scent in his wake, a balm against the queerness of the atmosphere, and Segundus followed him calmly, deeper into the growing dark of the woods.

The water was where Segundus had known it would be, a small lake nestled in the basin of a huge stand of pines. They had come upon it quite suddenly, so Childermass had been taken aback at the sight of it standing quietly there, still and cloaked in night. Darkness had fallen completely by this time and so Segundus produced a little crystal vial from the pocket of his wastcoat, which he filled with water at the lake’s edge. He silently passed it to Childermass, who in turn crossed his left hand over it in a small circle and muttered a word that made it glow, at first dim and watery and then bright as a harnessed star.

Segundus sighed to see the light refracting upon the smooth lake surface: the way it forced everything it encompassed into sharp relief, how it made everything beyond its reach grow flat and eerie. Its glow made Childermass seem quite the villain, in his dark coat and with his black hair that fell like spates of rain all down his face. They stood upon a small shore made of pebbles and rocks and regarded the light for a moment, and then they regarded each other for even longer moments that stretched into the breathless dark.

“Have any more of these?” Childermass asked, shaking the little vial. Points of light danced madly out across the water.

Segundus shook his head. “I was only carrying that one because I am hoping to - well, it is not important now. I regret to say I do not.” He could see the shape of what Childermass meant, and he did not like it the least bit. “We will have to wait until morning?”

“Yes, I think so.” Childermass sounded displeased, though displeased was perhaps putting too fine a point to it. He shrugged. “Well, it was never a very good plan.”

The light that Childermass was capable of producing was too pointed and bright to provide the proper reflection they needed for their purposes. The constellations of Faerie were faint and strange. They twisted into extraordinary, unfamiliar shapes and were rather too blue. Segundus could not find the moon at all. He rather suspected there might not be one, or if there was it was crouched sinister and expectant, just out of sight. It was too dark by half in this wretched place! 

“Yes,” Childermass agreed, when Segundus related these thoughts. He shook his head wryly. “But you need not make so many protestations. I know you well enough by now that I see you are at least a little pleased by these circumstances!”

Childermass produced a wine skin from some deep pocket and they shared it once they had found an agreeable clearing nearby the lake. It turned out to be a more than tolerable vin d’Avignon, whose name Childermass pronounced in excellent (though terribly-accented) French. Both of these things surprized Segundus somewhat, though he could not clearly say why. Childermass had certainly appreciated all the bottles of claret and carignan they had shared these past weeks, after all. And he had traveled quite a lot in his duties to Mr Norrell. In any case the wine went very far in making both of them feel more at ease, and so Childermass performed a small warming spell, they tucked their greatcoats about themselves, and they went to sleep.

Segundus was so exhausted, so wrung out, that he had assumed he would drop off immediately upon closing his eyes. He soon found this could not have been further from the truth. It was not as if there was anything truly - which is to say, terribly- lacking about their situation, he thought, beyond the fact that it was currently taking place in Faerie (which he was less concerned about than he might have endeavoured to be, as Childermass had noted). Indeed: the patch of moss they had found as their bed was soft enough, the spell Childermass had wrapped them in was warm, the woods were silent and still. Childermass was very near, on his back with his hands folded across his chest, which was steadily, slowly rising and steadily, slowly falling. Segundus had even gotten some much-coveted wine into himself. Still, he could not settle.

He twitched his feet first, shifting to a more comfortable spot. Then he put his hands behind his head. He immediately found this distinctly uncomfortable, removing them to his chest, which turned out to be equally as disagreeable. He was mid-turn to one side when a hand clamped down on his hip, pushing him rudely back the way he had come.

“If you value your life, you will lay still now,” Childermass drawled, lilting Northern vowels shocking alongside the solemnity of the trees.

“I am terribly sorry!” Segundus told him, embarrassed. “I suppose am having some difficulty finding sleep tonight. I did not mean to wake you.”

“It is all right,” Childermass said, taking his hand away as Segundus shifted to look at him. He was resting on his side now, looking for all the world as though the moss and the grasses were as comfortable to him as any down mattress. “I cannot truly blame you for it. This is not the finest bed I have ever slept on, either. Though I suppose it is also not the worst.”

Segundus hummed and pulled his greatcoat tighter around his waist. His hip felt warm and tender, as if it might bruise, though Childermass had not seized him so hard as that.

“Good night, Childermass,” he said, and he closed his eyes tightly and wished for sleep.

It was somewhere between the longed-for slumber and the hard edge of wakefulness that the thought took hold of him. He opened his eyes with a start, hand already reaching halfway out to touch Childermass upon the shoulder or what else he could not say. He found instead that Childermass was still awake and looking directly at him, eyes dark and fixed, as though he might have dirt smudged upon his nose, or a particularly unfortunate coiffure.

“Why did you not care to forewarn me?” Segundus asked him, finding himself suddenly vexed. Childermass had not even the decency to apologize for staring! “You read the cards! Surely you must have known this would happen?”

Childermass frowned at him. “This has only just occurred to you?”

“Yes!” Segundus cried, and pointed his finger at Childermass with some venom. “You did foresee this, did you not? Do not lie now, sir.”

Childermass pushed himself up on his elbow so that he loomed above Segundus, his hair falling in tangled masses against his pale cheeks. He looked on the verge of some cruelty, a peculiar tightness in his jaw that Segundus had rarely glimpsed. But then as he watched, Childermass took a great breath and lay himself back down. He lifted one corner of his mouth, a half-smile directed upwards at the strange firmament. “I do not often read my own cards. And I have certainly never read yours.”

“What!” Segundus peered eagerly at Childermass. “What do you mean? Why not?” 

He had surely thought, upon learning of Childermass’s talent for prognostication, that the man must have used his talents all those years ago to learn of and then stop Segundus’s school. To say nothing of the books he had snatched up, or the contract he had allowed Segundus to dodge the signing of (even as he had persuaded every other magician in Yorkshire to do it). Childermass had always had a habit of popping up wherever one least expected him to be. Segundus had thought his skill had explained this particular talent of his neatly away.

Childermass tipped his head back onto his pillow of moss. His voice was very quiet. “A man’s fortune is a useful thing to possess to be sure. I know that more intimately than most. But ask yourself: would a sailor truly want to know of an oncoming storm? One that will see his ship take a very wrong tack, and leave him and all his shipmates drowned or dashed dead upon rocks? It is his true fortune, yes. But I think you will find it is a rare man indeed who wishes to hear such harm awaits him. Folk do not visit yellow-curtained charlatans like Vinculus because they want to know the truth of things.”

Segundus felt very wrong-footed. “The sailor could make an effort to change the course of his ship! He might take leave, or feign some terrible illness, or run far inland and avoid ships entirely, if he knows the future. Surely knowing such a thing might happen would make it easy enough to prevent?”

“Now here’s a tricky thing.” Childermass sent a sly look over at him, piercing through the dark. “If he abandons his ship and moves himself inland, he is still destined to die. In fact I am of the opinion that the balance of things demands it. So the event will just take on a different shape now, and he will contract the pox and die from that instead. I do not think any man could petition death and expect to win his case. As to your first question, it is true that I have read my own cards on occasion. I would be very foolish if I did not. But if you learned to read them yourself you would find that they are not always so straight-forward as all that.”

Segundus could see the sense in this, but still felt it would have saved them some amount of trouble if Childermass had known beforehand what might befall them. He would have brought more crystal vials, in point of fact. More crystal vials could hardly have changed the course of fate or history. He told Childermass this, and Childermass laughed, silently, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. He waited for him to be quite finished before he asked, querulously, why Childermass had not ever read his cards.

But all Childermass would say on the matter was, “I already know you’re set to die trampled by children. I have no need to inquire further.”

It sounded well, or at least amusing, but he could not shake the sense that this was not the answer Childermass would have honestly given. This thought was interminable to Segundus, and he fell asleep some time later, turning it this way and that in his mind. He did not dream.

1Some things he had already known, of course. Some things he had not. Childermass was a talented prognostician. He had been born in Yorkshire. He had been raised a thief, and later became a sailor. He did not care overmuch for the rules of society, and the rules of society did not much care for him. When he went out he wore black and did not often bother to brush his hair, which things tended to make the ladies and gentlemen of York shrink away as if from a spectre whenever he deigned do his business there. What business that was, Segundus still did not feel qualified to say, though it involved a great many newspapers bought and letters sent and received. Childermass was, after all, still Childermass: a law unto himself.[return to text]

2In 1543 an Argentine magician by the name of Francis Selwyn had attempted to bring both himself and his fairy-servant, Wicked Jenny, though a magic-made portal from Cumberland to Kent. The purposes of this trip are lost to record, but much has been written on the incident, particularly concerning whether the resulting mess of effluvia and limbs had been caused by Selwyn’s own magical inability - he was not, many contemporaries agreed, a particularly gifted magician - or due to complications from an ongoing disagreement between himself and Wicked Jenny regarding whether or not Edward Hall’s recent work, _The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke_, was really any good at all. 

Childermass and Segundus were each well-acquainted with both scholarly and first-hand accounts of the event. They had also each independently arrived at the conclusion that they, personally, would never attempt magical travel with another being in tow.[return to text]

3 What are magicians, if not fond of theatre?[return to text]


	4. Chapter 4

He woke at dawn to Childermass’s fingertips, calloused and tender against his cheek - no, that was not right. He woke some time after dawn to a short sharp whistle and got himself up feeling very sore indeed after a night spent on the ground, squinting to find Childermass already up and leaning unconcernedly against a nearby tree with the crystal vial full of water in his hand. He held it aloft, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, so that it was struck by a sweet, clear beam of morning light, and was staring fixedly through the contents like a jeweller inspecting a particularly disappointing gem through a magnifying lens.

“I had hoped to catch a rainbow in that vial,” said Segundus, feeling very groggy. “One of my new students - Miss Agnes Horsfall is her name - managed it as her first act of magic. I thought it sounded very lovely indeed, and wondered what practical applications it might have.”

Childermass snorted, and cast him a look that was at once shuttered and warm. His eyes were bruised and dark looking. Segundus had an idea that he had not bothered to sleep at all; he was as unsurprized by this as he was surprized he himself had managed to.

“It occurred to me that I might perceive some differences between this lake water and our own, but all I have learned is that I have not seen lake water recently enough to tell. I will bring it back with us.” He slid the vial into his pocket and looked impatiently at Segundus. “Come on, get up.”

It was very cold, this Faerie spring morning. The wind bit and curled beneath his greatcoat where it had fallen somewhat open as he pushed himself up. It brought with it the very distinct and peculiar smell of roasted chestnuts and clove and raisins in hot wine, which seemed a terrible unkindness, given everything. Segundus shivered.

“I had told Miss Wintertowne we intended to look for the tower,” he remembered all at once, brushing leaves and little green bits of mosses from his coat and his breeches and feeling suddenly rather awful. “Oh, dear. Do you suppose they are awake yet? Do you suppose they have noticed we are gone? I would hate for any one to worry themselves overmuch on our behalf!”

Childermass cast him a very ironical look. “We left at half past four yesterday afternoon. I should say they would be very stupid indeed not to have noticed.”

He reached out then and he did something very peculiar. That is to say, he drew his hand from his pocket and he brushed off from the front of Segundus’s coat some leafy matter he had missed in his sudden alarm, the gesture at once brusque and delicate. Segundus could barely feel it through all his layers of clothing. All his breath caught in his throat. He wished to gently touch the bruised, dark skin beneath Childermass’s eyes, which held a look he had surely seen before. Last winter, he remembered. In a garden.

“There,” said Childermass, clearing his throat. “Now we will find the lake again and be home by breakfast.”

In the end the lake was as fine a pathway as they could have hoped for. They came through into the drawing room, and there they found their friends waiting - Mr and Mrs Honeyfoot and Miss Wintertowne, all of them in a serious little circle and intently discussing, he thought, what might be done to retrieve them from the mirror. They had never been gone so long! It was no wonder the three of them were so concerned. Vinculus was nowhere to be seen, which did not surprize him overmuch.

Childermass had insisted he go first, and so as he exited the mirror Mrs Honeyfoot gave an excited little shout that caught the attention of her husband, and then of Miss Wintertowne, who was on her feet and across the room before Childermass had even fully emerged.

She caught him up in a tight embrace, her little hands with their gentle needle-callouses tangling in the short hairs at the nape of his neck and knocking their heads together. They were of a height, the two of them, and so it was a somewhat confusing tangle of limbs when Segundus brought his arms up to wrap them around her, just as she attempted to do the same to him. He did not let himself worry about propriety for once. Propriety was for men who had not just come back from Faerie!

(For however dull the adventure had ultimately been. He consoled himself with the thought that he probably did not want for it be any more exciting. He should content himself with all the strange sights and smells, and devote himself to studying the little glass vial of lake water Childermass still held in his pocket.)

“Do not worry, Miss Wintertowne,” Childermass said, his voice farther away than Segundus had expected to find it, “I have returned him to you in one piece.”

“I am all gratitude for you, Childermass,” Miss Wintertowne said, releasing Segundus with a smile so sincerely relieved that he could not help but smile back, despite feeling rather ruffled by the sudden ferocity of her embrace.

He turned the smile towards Childermass, and found him already at the door. He was leaning against the jamb and looking very tired all of a sudden. Segundus longed to ask him what was wrong, if perhaps the change in atmosphere had affected him badly again, if he needed a chair to sit in, if he wished for tea to drink.

His attention soon wavered, however, for Mrs Honeyfoot immediately clasped Segundus to her bosom and began to cry, while her husband shook his hand madly so that his whole upper body shook too, and then they all began at once to ask a multitude of questions without pausing for single breath between them, so that the torrent of inquiry became so loud it could not be answered at all. This made Segundus feel suddenly so very fond towards his friends that he laughed and raised his hands, asking for peace and, if they would permit him, time to cleanse his person of the grime and dust of Faerie.

“Faerie!” cried Mr Honeyfoot, shocked beyond reason. “Oh, dear! We had thought you dead or trapped somewhere upon the King’s Roads! It never occurred to us that you might have ended up in Faerie!”

“Oh, you must tell us every thing!” said Mrs Honeyfoot.

“I suppose it was as ghastly as it usually is,” said Miss Wintertowne.

Segundus told them they must make sure not to get their hopes up too much, for it had not been as exciting a business as might be assumed. For one, they had not encountered any fairies at all, which could be considered a kindness, and they had not really seen all that much, either - though he was sure he could describe the flora of the place, which was strange as could be expected! This prompted Miss Wintertowne to inquire whether they had seen any of the, _well_ \- and here she began to describe huge, fleshy and carnivorous flowers with an appetite for any animal larger than a medium-sized dog, which had the effect of curtailing Mrs Honeyfoot’s tears and instead making her gasp and laugh in horror.

Childermass cleared his throat from the doorway. They all turned as one to look at him. “I have some business to attend to,” Childermass told them. “Thank you for your concern.” And with a nod to each of them, cold and not very gracious at all, he turned on his heel and strode from the room. There was some silence.

“Well!” said Mr Honeyfoot, aghast and fond in equal measure, “I suppose it falls to you, sir, to tell us all that you have seen.”

Segundus did. It was not as pleasant as it might have been, had Childermass stayed.

It took longer than he might have liked to realize that Childermass was avoiding him. It was only a month until the students arrived and his days were now chiefly occupied with all manner of last-minute preparations. In truth, Childermass appeared to be avoiding every other denizen of Starecross, from the cook - who said she had not seen him, but that her store of apples was as steadily depleting as it usually did when Childermass was home - to Miss Wintertowne, who said she had seen him, but that he had some urgent business to attend to and did not wish to look over her latest letter to the Times.

Vinculus had gone back to London for reasons Segundus did not like to think about, and still Childermass did not join him for their habitual dinners. It was a very lonely stretch of nights indeed, for by this point they had finished every preparation for the upcoming school-year as could rightly be expected. They had been so diligent in their making ready, in fact, that Mr Honeyfoot said he did not see what else there was to do, and thus he and Mrs Honeyfoot had declared they would take the week to themselves. Miss Wintertowne was very much of the same frame of mind, and declared her intention to take some few days to visit her mother, the venerable Mrs Wintertowne, in London.

He became very preoccupied with the idea that perhaps it was he who had somehow made Childermass uncomfortable. Perhaps he had said some thing disagreeable in Faerie. Perhaps he had touched Childermass in a way that Childermass did not wish to be touched. Perhaps, he thought, with a sort of resignation that felt inevitable and wretched both, Childermass had merely realized he no longer wished for his company and so had taken himself off some where else entirely so as to better avoid it.

And so he ate alone, and he worked alone, and his dreams - lately so uniform - began to twist themselves into strange new shapes.

_Sometimes he dreamed he was on the King’s Roads._

_He always dreamed he was on the King’s Roads._

_The man with the feathers was gone and in his place was a great raven that jumped and croaked and lunged at him with its vicious beak, its beady eyes shrewd and canny as any he had ever seen. The Roads sometimes themselves seemed to jump and lunge, so that he was thrown back and away from them, his hands reaching out to grasp some thing he could not name, the feather in his sleeve catching on the skin of his wrist and making him shout -_

He woke confused and vexed after one such dream, after one such lonely night, and found he suddenly very much wished he were not in Starecross any more. The clocks, as he lay beneath his warm counterpane, tolled a rolling one. These were not the hours of a proper gentlemen. But then, he felt, they were certainly the purview of a magician, which he most certainly could claim to be. And if he wished to go adventuring now, well! Who was to say he could not?

And so he got himself up. He put on his boots, and his scarf, and his greatcoat. By this point he and Childermass each had amassed a neat collection of such items as might be useful upon the Roads: crystal vials, thin lengths of rope, flasks of wine and whiskey.[1] He put all of these things in his pockets, proud of himself for being so sensible without Childermass there to prod and poke him into it.

Of course, all of this self-congratulation was for nought, for when he came out of the drawing room mirror Childermass - standing a short distance away along the length of a very large, very odd bridge - gave a great groan and said, “I should have known.”

“I beg your pardon,” Segundus said, very earnestly. “I had not thought to find you. I truly only wished to take a walk.”

“Upon the Roads? At such a late hour?” Childermass gave him such a glance, as though to say he did not believe it, as though to say he was instead inclined to believe that Segundus had somehow contrived to concert this meeting. That was all very well for Childermass, thought Segundus. He could believe what ever he wished to believe.

Segundus longed terribly for his warm bed. He could not currently think why he had ever supposed this late night adventure a good idea. He was in fact considering wishing Childermass a good night, for it does not do, he would have said (if Childermass had thought to ask), to stay where one is clearly unwelcome! But a thought took him, then. His entire mind turned to it, so that all the anxiousness that had so taken him seemed to melt and fade into the strange half-light of the Roads. It was as though a nearby door had opened and he had stepped through it, into to a familiar, much-loved room, all the while conscious of never having known that such a door or a room existed in the first place.

“I feel as though I have been here before,” Segundus said to himself. “I think I have.”

He related this to Childermass, who still seemed greatly unhappy to have been found, and so only shrugged. “I do not think it was in my dreams that I saw it. I think I have been here before in actuality. I have passed across this bridge, and down that winding staircase, and through - oh! I remember now. Here is where I found the hall which contained that statue of the Raven King.”

This was entirely calculated to regain Childermass’s interest, for while the man had not said as much he was currently shifting about in a manner entirely unlike himself, as though he wished greatly to be any where else it were possible for him to currently be. Now he cast a sharp, dark look at Segundus and said, “You must show me at once.”

“Do you truly wish me to?” Segundus could not help but to ask, though he did not wait for Childermass’s answer. Childermass’s ironical, dark look was answer enough. “Very well. If you will follow me, I think I remember the way.”

And so they walked together across the great stone bridge. They got themselves down the winding little staircase, and onto the water-logged bridge, which neither of them complained about. Not a word was uttered between them, in fact, so that when they came to the magnificent stone profiles of the Raven King, Childermass’s quiet gasp was startling enough that Segundus could not help but look at him, at the silver scar across his cheek, at his long tangles of dark hair that fell like rainwater.

It was not much further from there. Childermass began to take on an aspect of wonder, quite unlike his usual self. When they reached the hall he looked first upon it - with its carvings of great black birds - and then at Segundus, as hopeful as he had ever seemed.

“This is it,” said Segundus, staring first at the great curved doorway and then at Childermass, who was very still beside him. “I believe I must have described it to you. I saw it the very first day I went upon the Roads. I suppose you remember it contains a very old, very beautiful statue of the Raven King that frightened me very badly once. Though I cannot suppose why that should have been. I do not feel frightened now.”

Childermass did not reply, but he did cast a very urgent look at Segundus, as though imploring him for some coveted thing he could not articulate, nor bring himself to ask for. Together they began up the dirty white marble steps in a careful, hesitant manner, Childermass stepping in the way of a man who knows what he will see upon turning a corner and does not wish to see it. Segundus had never seen him thus. He had not thought it was in Childermass’s nature at all to be so hesitant or so careful. But then he thought of Childermass’s hand upon his cheek, and he supposed sometimes he did not know as well as he thought he did.

Childermass got there steps ahead, despite his pace. He stopped and wavered there in the doorway, himself as still as any statue. He turned to Segundus. “How could this be?” he said. In his voice was a tone that Segundus had never heard before.

Segundus caught him up, and stepped somewhat in front of Childermass so he could clearly see what had upset his friend so. “Oh!” he gasped, “Oh, dear.”

The hall was empty. The plinth, the throne, the man, the raven - all were gone. The feeling in the room was bereft, as though the plinth, the throne, the man, and the raven all had only gone just a few moments ago - as one might watch a beloved friend turn a corner and find their hand still upraised, even though they have already passed from one’s sight.

Childermass began immediately to belabour how they should have come sooner; how he ought to have begun his search the very instant Segundus had informed him of this place; how distracting and confounding was Segundus, with his school, and his ideals, and his smile.

“My smile? I beg your pardon?” said Segundus, feeling rather beleaguered by this point.

Childermass cast him a cold look. “It is no matter. Why didn’t I think to come sooner? I allowed myself no end of distractions, and look where it has gotten me. I am the reader of the King’s own word. If any one should have come across this statue, it should have been me.”

Well, thought Segundus, perhaps that is why you did not see it. Perhaps there is some thing that compelled me, and only me, to find it. This thought seemed a great unkindness. He did not wish to speak it out loud. Instead he cast a sharp look at the spot where the plinth, the throne, the man, and the raven had been and found himself compelled to view it up close. He could not have said why he felt so.

The shafts of light that fell through the ruined ceiling were warm. The shadows were very chill. He felt the comforting bulk of Childermass stepping silently, following directly behind, as they passed through the once-palatial hall, all their shared footsteps muffled by some thing he could not see. Every chance sound felt as queer and as though wrapped in wool, or perhaps as though this whole scene were taking place under water. Segundus thought to mention this to Childermass, but one look at his cold, set face convinced him otherwise.

The place where the plinth, the throne, the man, and the raven had been was not entirely empty. Segundus supposed he had not truly expected it to be.

In their place was a small bundle that, when Childermass bent to retrieve it, proved itself to be quite extraordinary. It was two black feathers, strangely cold and coated in some amount of black frost, tied together by long, tangled lengths of fine English ivy. Segundus touched the strange frost with the tip of his finger. It came away streaked a very dark blue. The feathers bloomed more and more of the stuff, as though bleeding from the spot where he had touched. It began to run down Childermass’s hands in rivulets, and to drip upon the dirty floor.

“Ink,” said Childermass, slowly. “A very cold ink.”

The ink and the ivy and the feather reminded him of nothing so much as some attempt to -

“Oh! It is a spell! Oh, Childermass,” Segundus cried, and turned on his heel to regard the other man, who was staring back at him, black eyes wide and shewing some thing like shock but warmer and deeper - some thing sharp and exhilarated. He plucked at Childermass’s greatcoat with one nervous hand: first the lapel, then the sleeve, entirely unable to settle. He felt he could not help but to touch. “It has been a spell all along, don’t you see? I do not know the full shape of it yet, but oh! I have been all this time dreaming of the Roads and of a man with two -”

“Two black feathers,” said Childermass hoarsley, catching his hand in his own wet, ink-stained one. “Two black feathers held by John Uskglass. Oh, I am sorry for it. I did not think - I did not think!”

He had not the time to be shocked at the idea, that somehow Childermass knew his dream so intimately, or that they might have been sharing the same dream all this time, or that Childermass should be apologizing to him for the first time in his memory. Because Childermass boldly pulled his hand, and pulled him forward, and pulled him up, up, until he pulled him in and did something even more shocking than anything Segundus could have imagined, and pressed their mouths together. The touch was warm and soft and yielding all over, when he had never known Childermass to yield to anything. But this was not true, he thought, all at once. He did know it, he had known it for weeks now, for he had dreamed this, too.

“In my dream, you -” he pulled away to say, feeling somewhat irate. It did not do to go about in other men’s dreams kissing them without their permission. Especially if the permission would have been gladly given!

“I thought you were the dream,” said Childermass, and kissed him again. And again, and again. Segundus could not remember ever being kissed thusly. They were warm, melting kisses - things made of drinking chocolate and marzipan, each pressed onto whichever precise stretch of skin that Childermass wished at that moment to be kissing. First his upper lip, and then his lower. His cheeks, his chin, his forehead, the tender skin beneath his jaw.

“I wondered why I should kiss you in a dream, once and then never again,” said Segundus, shivering. “It seemed a great unfairness.”

Childermass took his mouth again, for that. He set his hands upon Segundus’s face, the bundle of ivy and feather and ink falling to the floor, and his rough thumbs pressed into his cheek so that his mouth opened. The first brush of his tongue was strange and nearly unwelcome, but then Childermass tilted their mouths at such an angle and licked at him until Segundus sighed and then buckled against him.

He brought his own hands up to clutch at Childermass's greatcoat, unsure whether he wanted to pull him closer or push him away. It seemed very correct to be doing such things as this, here in this place of indefinite light and shadow. Propriety demanded he must separate himself from Childermass, and yet there was a bright hot thing shivering all through the core of him, some thing that he felt would only be soothed with more of these warm, sweet kisses.

Childermass snarled at the first brush of Segundus’s fingertips against his neck, where he stroked gently at prickly warm skin above the soft old neckcloth, wondering. Suddenly he reached up, wrapping thin strong fingers around Segundus’s wrists and drawing his hands down and away. He pressed them somewhat behind Segundus’s own hips until he could not move, could not even dream of moving, and then he took Segundus’s throat between his teeth and bit down.

“Oh God,” Segundus said, whimpered, his breath catching in his throat. It hurt, it punched through him, he could not breathe. “Childermass, I cannot -”

Childermass shushed him, humming the sound against his skin, the vibration so fine against the fading pain that every nerve in his body seemed to pool and spark there. His touch gentled. He released Segundus’s wrists and kissed his neck, gentler even than he had kissed him upon the mouth. His beard scratched but his lips were soft, and Segundus found himself hissing, tilting his head back for more of it.

“Ah,” Childermass murmured, right into Segundus’ ear, the light touch of his breath making Segundus shiver and clutch at him. “So that’s it, then?”

“What is -?” Segundus managed to ask, alarmed by the note of proprietary discovery in Childermass's voice, but then Childermass reached up and ran his thumb along Segundus’s mouth, feather-light. He sighed instead, rubbing against Childermass's finger, feeling the soft skin of his own lips catch and drag against the callouses.

Childermass seemed transfixed, his eyes huge and dark and ravening. He dipped his head down and suddenly replaced his finger with his mouth and then with his tongue, gently tracing the seam of his lips with it while Segundus stood trembling, his breath coming in short sharp gasps that made his chest heave. He opened his mouth on a pant and Childermass made a triumphant sound, licking his way in, reaching down to gentle his hand against the nape of his neck, crowding him close with the other at the base of his spine, touch hot even through all the layers of clothing Segundus wore. His hips were pressed tight to Childermass’s thigh, now.

Childermass drew away suddenly, with a filthy slick sound. “Follow me,” he said, stepping backward with a fierce grin. He nodded at the bundle of ink and ivy. “And bring that with you.”

It seemed as though he took all the heat in the world away with himself. Segundus shivered, involuntarily, reaching for Childermass, who gave a dark pleased laugh and stepped away through a shadow.

Segundus fairly tumbled out of the mirror in Childermass’s spartan little attic room, at once pleased he had guessed right - for Childermass was there before the unmade bed, already out of his coats and fixedly unbuttoning his waistcoat, his hair wild and lovely where Segundus had pulled on it - and just as vexed - for how cruel was Childermass to have left him so bereft and aching. He shook the bundle of feather and ivy and ink that he had retrieved.

It occurred to him, belatedly, that Childermass’s hands had been all over ink when they had first touched, and now he must also be covered in it. In fact Childermass had the stuff smeared about his neck, and staining his shirt, and his hands - always ink-stained! - were blue to the first knuckle. Segundus had not supposed there was such a great quantity of ink upon the feathers. Perhaps they were themselves made of ink, or contained huge amounts of it somehow inside their tines.

He set the bundled thing upon Childermass’s desk, thinking meanly that it would serve him right if all his books and belongings were coated in the stuff. He could see smudges of it kissing the edge of Childermass’s lips. He thought he could taste it, on his own.

“You - rogue! How dare you!” He cried, unable to think of much else but to wave his own ink-coated finger beneath Childermass’s nose. Childermass bit at it, playful, and then got his hands in Segundus’s coat and began to push it off his shoulders, his touch gentle, his countenance soft.

“I would not toy with you as much if it were not so amusing,” he admitted, and pushed himself up against Segundus’s front once the coat was rudely discarded upon the ground, bending his head to nose at Segundus’s hair and temple like some great beast. Segundus supposed all their clothing would need replacing, after this. He found he did not mind this notion as much as he felt he rightly ought to.

Segundus pushed him back, lifted on his toes and began to unknot Childermass’s stained cravat. It was difficult work, with Childermass breathing in his ear, with Childermass’s half-dry, calloused touches alighting up and down his sides, all the way down his flanks as far as he could surely reach, each pass sparking strange new warmth across his skin. Finally he unwound it, letting it flutter to the floor, and pressed his mouth against the hot, stubbled skin of Childermass’s throat, where his breath went quick and sharp. His skin smelled as English ivy might - green and earthen, warmed by the sun.

“What do you suppose it all means?” he asked. He could not help but to ask, curiosity gnawing at him as keenly as this heavy, new hunger was.

Childermass looked down at him, amused. He had by this time gotten Segundus’s waistcoat off and his shirt untucked. Segundus supposed he had always been an industrious man. His fingers and palms spread warm and gentle against his sides, softly stroking, his hand big enough that it took no effort at all for him to reach up with his thumb to brush against Segundus’s nipple, which struck through him like a bolt and made him sigh.

“You are a very strange creature,” said Childermass. Segundus knew; Childermass never seemed to stop telling him. “I have finally got you where I have wanted you, and you wish to ask questions! Well, I will tell you plainly. I do not care any more. I expect the answer will come to us in time, as this answer has come to us. I am the reader of the King’s book. But I am also yours, if you will have me, and so you will be the first to hear what I discover.”

Segundus could not do anything but kiss him again. “Yes,” he gasped, against Childermass’s mouth, hopelessly entangled - their arms, and legs, and, it seemed to him, some intrinsic fiber of him that Childermass had caught and braided into himself. “Yes, nothing would please me more than that.”

“Oh! I will never understand the point of this!” Lucy Coffin cried, very much frustrated. Her hands were tangled in a long skein of red thread, which she was sewing into a very messy, very belaboured hoop.

It was a summer night, warm and heavy with rain, and so Charles had opened all of the windows in the house and through them drifted the thick, sweet smell of roses and of the overgrown patch of honeysuckle that grew beneath the parlour window. He had settled, this past year, and was no longer quite so wary of magical doings, though surprizes and messy cravats were still received with no small amount of consternation. This was a continual relief for Segundus, for Starecross was lately filled to the very brim with magical doings.

“It pleases men to know women have some thing with which to occupy their time,” said Miss Wintertowne. She was hiding a sly smile in the corner of her mouth, he could see it plain as anything. She was sewing too - herself and all of the young lady magicians who now occupied Starecross alongside her, some of them happier with this activity than others - and appeared to be making some progress on her latest scene, which was a tall black tower with a high window, from which small people appeared to be tumbling. “I say it is always good for a lady to appear engaged in the presence of men. They speak more freely then, and will leave you quite alone.”

Mrs Honeyfoot, playing some complicated card game with her husband and a handful of the young gentlemen pupils, gaily laughed. “Miss Wintertowne is very correct. And if you begin to tell a gentleman about all the different stitches one may learn, they will surely find they have some urgent business to attend elsewhere!”

Childermass snorted. Segundus, with his chocolate, sat upon his favourite armchair in front of the fire, cast a fond look in his direction. He was as usual: hidden away in the corner of the room with a small table before him, all his cards laid out face-down upon it. As Segundus watched he turned one card over and considered it for some time, face unreadable in the dim candlelight.

“Magicians should not have to learn such things! I am sorry, Miss Wintertowne. You must know we appreciate you very much! Only, if I am to be a magician, what uses will I have for stitching or French or dancing?” said Agnes Horsfall. Her own embroidery was going well enough, it seemed. Miss Wintertowne and Mrs Honeyfoot both had earlier complimented her small, neat stitches. Still she seemed deeply unhappy with the occupation, though it is often the nature of young ladies to band together to decry all their shared sufferings.

“I think it serves a magician very well to learn every thing it is possible to learn,” said Segundus, smiling at her. “For instance, that red thread Miss Coffin is holding may be of use in any number of spells. I myself use red thread more often than any other colour. A lady may carry such things in her valise. As a means of accomplishing spellwork it seems a blessing, I think, that you may always have some access to these tools, where myself or Mr Sparrow -” Thomas Sparrow, a spice merchant’s son of 15, who had proven himself very shy, and had developed a habit of reclusing himself quite some ways from the rest of the group. “- might be obliged to beg some off of you, as we are not so likely to have our own.”

Childermass turned over another card, and then another. Segundus glanced at him. He could never help but to glance: his gaze drawn to Childermass again, and again, and over, as to some picture in a gallery that one could always derive pleasure from viewing, or to the curling penmanship of one of Strange’s love letters to the King’s Roads.

“Mr Childermass?”

Childermass looked startled at the attention. Indeed, many of the young persons in Segundus’s charge seemed terrified of the man, though he had also witnessed no small amount of giggling and carrying on from a handful of the young ladies. “What?”

It was Thomas Sparrow, his voice barely a whisper from his solitary corner. “I only wish to know - what are you reading?”

Childermass considered the question for some time. He considered it for so long, in fact, that Segundus saw Mr Honeyfoot - dear Mr Honeyfoot! - opening his mouth to interject, though what he would say was any one’s guess. Thomas Sparrow waited patiently. He was small for his age, with a sharp, quick wit and a talent for prognostication, though his skills so far extended only to the reading of rising kettle-steam and leaves upon river water.

“I am reading the fortune of a friend,” he said, eventually. A smile spread all up one side of his face like ivy. Segundus took a deep breath and found, in some deep well of himself, a feather that shimmered all the colours of affection - gold, and red, and purple. “But if you wish to join me, I will start again, and you may observe closely.”

Thomas Sparrow scrambled to his feet and was at Childermass’s side almost before he had finished speaking. Childermass turned over the last card. He looked at it for a very long moment, his face softly unreadable, and then he held it up so that Segundus may see it. It was the King of Wands, upright. He held it aloft for just a moment, and then he handed it to Thomas Sparrow, who took it carefully in both of his slender hands and looked at it as one might look upon some precious momento - for all it was inked upon a scrap of receipt paper. He regarded it for a moment, and then looked beseechingly at Childermass, who laughed.

“Each card has many meanings. Some of them are more obvious than others. It is up to the cards you draw alongside, or the position of the card itself, to tell you the whole shape of what you wish to know. Tell me what you think it means,” said Childermass.

And Thomas Sparrow did. And Miss Wintertowne continued to sew her black tower with all its little atrocities, laughingly correcting Lucy Coffin’s abhorrent stitching once or twice. And Mr and Mrs Honeyfoot lost their game of cards, and were very gracious indeed about it. And Segundus sat in his favourite armchair, with his chocolate, before the fire, and found he could not stop himself from smiling at all of them, at every thing. Childermass, once or twice, smiled back.

1Perhaps inspired by Segundus’s story of Miss Horsfall’s success in capturing a rainbow, Childermass had recently managed to entrap some small bit of a shadow in one of their little crystal vials. It was not inclined to flee so much as it was inclined to shrink, which was very odd behavior indeed for a shadow. Shadows, they both had rather thought, were inclined to spread themselves.

Segundus took to feeling rather kindly towards it, for when Childermass or he would chuse to tip it into a little silver bowl for further study, it curled itself against the edges of the bottom and could be coaxed to do little else but slip itself back inside its vial, and thus back inside the small desk drawer where they kept it.

They never did find a proper use for the rope. The wine, Childermass would have said, is self-explanatory.[return to text]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Pasiphile. JS&MN is one of my favorite novels of all time, and it was a serious treat to finally have an excuse to write about all of my favorite characters therein! I really truly hope you enjoy this meandering monster of a story.


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